
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1165026.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire_-_George_R._R._Martin
  Relationship:
      Sandor_Clegane/Sansa_Stark
  Character:
      Sansa_Stark, Sandor_Clegane
  Additional Tags:
      Coming_of_Age, Porn, Smut
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-02-02 Chapters: 12/12 Words: 37619
****** Running with the Hare and Hunting with the Hound (the Reboot) ******
by kimberlite8
Summary
     Sansa Stark has a coming-of-age dream about an encounter between her
     adult self and Sandor Clegane. A series of vignettes about the sexual
     and moral fruition of Sansa Stark and a character study about the
     duality of Sandor Clegane.
     This is an illustrated novella and is meant to be read in the manner
     of a real book with two pages side by side. As such, I've had to
     publish it as an emagazine/pdf flipbook rather than on the AO3
     platform.
     I've provided links below on how to read so that my A03 readership
     can access this fanwork. I've also uploaded the text only to A03.
     The emagazine Sub Cultured interviewed me about this fanwork. Read it
     here linkie
***** Chapter 1 *****
Chapter Notes
     This is an illustrated novella and is meant to be read in the manner
     of a real book with two pages side by side. As such, I've had to
     publish it as an emagazine/pdf flipbook rather than on the AO3
     platform.
     But here's the text only as well for A03
      
     I've provided links in the body on how to read the illustrated
     novella so that my A03 readership can access this fanwork.
      
     In order to optimize your reading experience, please follow these
     guidelines for your device:
         * Computer / Laptop: Download_this pdf_file  **
         * Ipad / Other tablet / Cellphone (orient device to landscape
           view): Click_on_this_emagazine_link
     **PDF files require your system has the free software, Adobe_Reader

     If you'd like to leave reviews on A03, I would certainly be
     appreciative.
 
***** Yellow Eyes Opening ... *****
Evening
           you gather back
                      all that dazzling dawn has put asunder:
you gather a lamb
gather a kid
gather a child to its mother
Sappho, Fragment 104A
 
Alayne’s eyes lit upon the image reflected in the pool of water. She leaned
forward, peering closer, the image so startlingly new she was able to look upon
it as she would a stranger. A narrow waist curving upward to ample breasts,
auburn hair styled in the Northern fashion, haloing a face as perfect as a
porcelain doll’s. She parted a plait of hair between her fingertips. In the
dappled sunlight of the forest, the strands seemed to prism, separations of
saturated color—copper, garnet, rosewood and vermilion—as glossy as lute string
silk.
The stranger would have been ornamentally pretty, save for one contradicting
feature: her eyes. Set against her doll’s face, those large blue eyes seemed to
burn with the intensity of a dying consumptive, giving her visage—whether she
deserved it or not—the look of character and depth.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the impossible scent of hawthorn and ash and
soldier pines. A dream, nothing but a pleasant dream for as long as it lasts.
Turning her face up to the sky, she made her appeal to the trees, “I'm the
Princess of Winterfell.”
As if in answer, summer snow began to earthward drift, crystalline bits of
nothing as soft as goose down. Her palms grew warm as her memory rolled over
the impression of smooth granite walls, heated by the spring waters that rushed
through them as blood rushes through a man’s body. Other memories intruded,
sharp, unstoppable: the smell of the peat cooking fires, the taste of honey-
sweetened hippocras, the comfort of another body alongside hers under a
mountain of down blankets. The other body had only ever been Arya but it was as
if her senses possessed the luxury of their own fantasies. They fed her
memories of things that had never happened. A man’s body, his thick arms
holding her tightly. His raspy laughter pooling into the narrow space between
her nape and the collar of her bedgown as he pressed his bulk to hers in secret
paths and curves.
She kicked up a mound of snow that lay at her feet and began to laugh in a
wholehearted way that she had not laughed for years. Her summer wool skirts
became a white churn as pretty patched-together fantasies fluttered in the dark
recesses of her brain. Let me dream of a gentle, brave champion to come rescue
me. He'll slay my enemies and win my love. He'll take me back to Winterfell and
we'll be ever so happy for ever and ever …
A hulking black shape cast its long shadow across the pool.
All the blood in her veins lit. Her body stilled, suspended in the posed
position of a Lysene dancer, arms raised as if the music had stopped for a
count of three. She felt grey eyes on her, feeding off her form, leaching the
density from her bones until they felt as light and as airy as a —
“Little bird.”
She turned just in time to see the last word cut through the cold air,
condensing into a warm puff before his mouth. She was so dumbstruck that she
couldn’t seem to even begin to form words—I don’t know what to say—for a few
moments.
She watched the snowflakes fall, their delicate sixfold symmetry latching onto
his heavy brows, giving the black hairs a spiky appearance. Marked how the cold
wind was turning his large hooked nose pink. His very breath fascinated her:
the movement of his broad chest underneath a soft woolen tunic, the rise, the
hitch, the letting-go of air in little clouds from his chapped lips. Oh, that
face. The right side gaunt, angular planes as sharp-edged as a longsword. The
left side—a maiden's fantasy—she strangled a hysterical laugh, balling a hand
into a fist. It trembled with the ghost-sensations of twisted flesh as hard as
leather.
She batted away the snow that gathered on her eyelashes, feeling like a
blinking deer staring into a deep pool of something unknown and
unthinkable—herself—the stranger of whom she felt she was just beginning to
make acquaintance.
“Lady Sansa … look at you. Aren’t you every inch the woman?” He smacked his
lips— “Damn. Blood red rose with each petal bent back,”—and he smirked at her.
But she had caught the quiet and humble gruffness in his voice when he mouthed
the word woman. As if she was the eternal woman—spun sugar femininity—boiled
down to every aspect of that word’s ineffable charm.
“My lord.” Sansa had meant it to be a greeting though it came out sounding like
an interjection: of surprise, of pleasure, of dismay. She had not seen him for
two whole years. He had come to her in the darkness, stinking of wine and blood
as green fire filled the sky. He took a song and a kiss and left me nothing but
a bloody cloak.
He had seen more blood since—it dawned on her that his left ear, once a stub,
was now completely missing. “I was injured in a dogfight. They’re dead but I’m
not as pretty as I used to be…” he muttered, while combing his hair with his
fingers over the left side of his head. How baffling it was that she should
imagine herself as beautiful as a lady in a song while imagining him an even
uglier monstrosity. He stopped his fussing suddenly, his voice taking on a
menacing edge as he shifted forward an inch. “Do I still frighten you, girl?
That ice-rimmed arse leaking from the sight of my ugly face?”
There was a time when his face could make her cry, his words make her feel
stupid and baited. There were no tears now. They were all alone in the
wilderness of her imagination.
Inside her brain, a sleeping wolf sprang awake, its yellow eyes opening in the
dark.
 
***** The Wilderness Within *****
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Sappho, Fragment 47
 
Sandor Clegane barked with laughter as if he could understand her, the passions
she suppressed, the drifting half-thoughts of which she was not yet wholly
aware. The blood rose in her face. She was too precariously close to him. She
took one, two, three premeditated steps back.
“Stay,” he ordered. It was in vain—he was her Hound but she was not his lapdog.
As quick as a hare, she turned and ran.
She moved swiftly but the trees grew thick and tall around her, their branches
whipping her skin, the wind hissing through them like a thousand vipers. She
glanced back and saw him giving chase, now bewilderingly dressed in full plate.
Oh, he was so unbelievably fast! Yet that should have been no surprise to her.
She had seen him fight his monstrous brother in the Hand's Tourney and he had
been quicker and more agile than any man his size had a right to be.
Despite the weight of his armor, he was outpacing her. “Little bird, little
bird …” his shouts echoing louder and louder.
They sounded strangely plaintive to her ears: long and raspy, full of a
terrible sweetness, like the growls of her direwolf grown gruff with yearning
whenever she had found Sansa’s bedchamber door barred.
She was becoming winded, her breath hitching painfully in her chest. Gauntlets
brushed against her waist …
Then the land began to roll. She found herself on horseback. She was riding a
white mare, riding harder and with greater skill than she had ever shown in the
waking world. Before her, as far as the eye could see in any direction, was
yellow grass and the blue of the sky in brilliant contrast. The Dothraki sea,
Sansa gasped, while at the same moment the sound of the thunder of hooves came
ever closer … 
She glanced again behind her shoulder and saw him in pursuit, mounted on his
giant black courser and wearing that fearsome snarling dog's head helm. The
helm shielded his eyes but she could feel their predatory gaze.
It filled her with dangerous excitement, a sexual thrill that she felt but
could hardly name. The very wind seemed to bow before her in obeisance, a
breeze combing the fields in waves, parting it into deeper shades that caught
the sunlight and shone like gold. She rode into it, a daring exhilaration
blossoming inside of her. As if from the roof of the sky to the roots of the
grass, the black earth was traveling through her, instead than her through it.
As if she was not running away from the black rider but rather in pursuit of
him. 
Sansa dug her heels into her mare's sides. “Faster, faster,” she cried but the
mare was at her limits.
Suddenly, the man and his horse were right beside her. She shrieked like a
rabbit caught in a snare as he snatched her from her horse with one mailed
hand. A chill shot through her spine even as her blood felt too hot for her
veins.
“You're mine, girl,” the Hound snarled then burst into laughter, the bark of a
pack of wild dogs unleashed upon her.
Her body went slack, compliant as a concubine.
 
 
***** Hare and Hound Games *****
 
up with the roof!
Hymenaios—
lift it, carpenters!
Hymenaios—
the bridegroom is coming up
equal to Ares,
Hymenaios—
much bigger than a big man!
Hymenaios!
Sappho, Fragment 111
 
Sandor Clegane carried her, slung over his shoulder, into a tent and dumped her
onto a featherbed. It was soft and warm and deep, piled high with furs that
breathed out puffs of comfort. She resisted the urge to sink down into it,
scrambling up, supporting her weight on her elbows. “Lion pelts … you
bloodthirsty wolf-bitch,” he rasped, rubbing the fur against her cheek. Fur to
skin, the pelts were divine. Sansa ran her tongue against the back of her front
teeth as she caressed the fur with her fingers: golden and soft, the thickest,
most extravagant material she had ever felt.
With his free hand, he brushed a strand of hair that had drifted onto her
cheek. Her eyes widened while her caresses, so shockingly bold, began to move
between the fur and the splayed fingers of the mailed hand that held it to her.
He moved to shape the contours of the bones of her face, his palm so large he
could touch both corners of her jaw with the tips of his thumb and forefinger.
Sansa grew perfectly still, her tummy lifting, her cheeks on fire. He still
wore his dog’s head helm but it was if she had the power to pierce steel. She
could read the play of emotions on his face. Saw the boy crouching in the
shadows, fascinated by the brightness of an intolerably alluring toy yet
terrified to touch it indelicately.
Her lips parted, forming a little ‘oh’ of anticipation. He lifted his thumb and
ran it across her bottom lip, brushing back and forth. Her heart pounded
violently against the wall of her chest, mouth dry from merely breathing.
Involuntarily, her tongue darted out to lick her chapped lips, coming into
contact ever so briefly with his thumb. She tasted the bitter saltiness of the
metal and swallowed hard. 
With the weight of his thumb, he rolled her lip down, exposing the deep pink of
the inner lining. She ran her tongue along the edge of his thumb, eyes shutting
violently tight. How appalling that he should make her taste it, make it
slippery and wet.
“Little bird,” he sputtered. “Little bird …”
He pushed her back onto the bed. She felt the press of a cold knife against her
throat, its bite no sharper than a pinch.
It should have made her panic but instead a languid limpness flowed everywhere,
pooling most especially at the base of her tummy. The knife moved downwards
into the opening of her gown. He was undressing her, peeling back the remnants
of her clothing as if he was skinning a hare. She felt the coolness of the air
and made a move to cover her breasts but he swatted her hands aside. Her right
palm flew to shield her face instead, the last storehouse of her modesty.
His cold mailed hands began to sweep across her upper body, her neck, her
collarbone, before resting anxiously against the place where her breasts met
her underarms. His hands trembled to cup first one breast, then the other—a
gentle fondling as if he was petting a dove. His hands felt … pleasing. Strong,
more than strong, more than healthy to be sure. Her nipples contracted under
his touch. He grunted, pushing her breasts tightly together, bouncing them as
if he was trying to judge their weight. Then his hands smoothed down her sides,
one hand going between her legs …
“Take these off. Let me look at you.” He pushed the scrap of cotton to the side
before she had time to comply. The lacy edge pressed between her slit, half
revealing, half concealing her. His forefinger traced along the material,
stroking up and down the crevice, the band of fabric narrowing and narrowing as
she squirmed. She began to shake her head from side to side, unable to gather
up the words to make him stop. But either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care.
His fingers hooked into the strings of her smallclothes, untying the knot and
pulling them down.
She pictured that day. The howling mob had hemmed her in and thrown filth at
her and tried to pull her off her horse and would have done worse if the Hound
had not cut his way to her side. How hard she had clung to his back as they
rode her horse into the Red Keep. Her left fist bunched hard in the furs that
lined the bed, her nerves on fire at the memory of the scratchy white wool of
his Kingsguard cloak, finer than any velvet. I could keep you safe. No one
would hurt you again, or I'd kill them.
“Oh Gods!” she made a sound like a breathless sob. It was abominable and it was
wonderful to be covered by him. She hardly knew what to do …
He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up so that she sat astride him,
twisting her right arm until it lay tucked behind her back. 
Sansa was forced to look, staring directly into his dog’s head helm. The sight
made her light-headed. His palms then slid down her back before curling under
her buttocks, massaging them for long moments. His closeness was suffocating.
Her breathing became audible, hard pants as if she was still winded from the
chase.Too fast. Everything is moving too fast, she thought.
She made a furtive glance down and watched where the cloth bulged. She hadn’t
been bold enough to look before but suspected his erection had been there from
their first encounter in the wilderness. Sandor Clegane missed nothing: she had
the complete attention of those grey eyes behind the helm. He brusquely shoved
his hips towards her with a dirty chuckle.
“Oh,” she cried out, at a loss for words to describe the commotion inside of
her. She squirmed, her body moving in confusion, tottering between invitation
and denial. That only seemed to excite him further. He let out a low animal
groan, gripping her buttocks fiercely in both his hands, spreading the cheeks
wide so that she could feel a pulling tension at the little hole in her bottom.
He ground himself against her as low, gravelly grunts escaped from his throat,
like the crooning of a bullfrog in heat. She would have giggled had she not
understood their source—what a delirious experience, funny and incredible and
strange. She wanted to close her legs. She wanted to spread them wide open. A
knuckle brushed against the crease of her buttocks before a finger unfurled to
move inwards, parting the folds, caressing the slit, entering her in a slow
slide—
—in a part of her never felt by anyone. Sensation shifted. A frightening breach
of privacy. Sansa closed her eyes as the taste of mint overwhelmed her for a
moment, huge fears that rolled up out of nowhere.
“Easy, easy,” he said as she writhed violently against him, pushing with her
hands and knees. He clutched at her arms to control her which made her flail,
swing and thrash harder. Panic gnawed her, a prey animal caught in a trap. Her
waking hours were spent as a bagged rabbit, scrambling to get free, barely
enduring her own hopeless captivity. Oh, if heinsisted … she'd chew off her own
leg.
“Sansa, open your eyes, open your eyes.” When she complied, she saw that he had
his hands up, palms facing her as if in surrender. “Just a game, girl … hare
and hound games of your own devising. My power is just a pretense. Look, look
at me.”
She looked at him, really looked. He wasn't the bad man with the minty kisses,
the mockingbird who cast a giant’s shadow. He was her Hound. What was this
between them? Sansa didn't quite understand her tangled feelings for him. Was
it love?No. She loved her parents, her brothers, Arya, Lady. She knew what love
was. This fancy was closer to love than any infatuation that had formerly
possessed her. She had kept his blood-stained white cloak hidden in a cedar
chest, separating it from her clean summer silks with a sheet of linen spread
with strawberry leaves and rose petals. There had been some private emotion
between them, a confiding intimacy that was too tender for her to abandon. She
had conjured him up because …
“You want to be with a man and you're looking at the one you want.” He shook
his head in disbelief. “Aren't you the perverse one, little bird? So dark,” he
rasped.
“Who would have imagined it? Not me. Not in a thousand years.” He then actually
laughed, a sudden loud chortle, bahahaha, that the helm turned into a hollow
rumble. The laugh was mean, making her feel as if he was pinching her all over
her body. She narrowed her eyes at him. This was her dream. He was a butcher
but she was nobody’s meat.
Then she too burst into laughter, gleeful giggles, slightly breathy,
entertained by her own bewildering imagination. Her body shivered, a fearsome
jolt of excitation just from looking at him. There was some mysterious force of
personality inside of him, a hidden key that loosened the locks inside of her.
Sansa laid back on the bed and parted her legs slightly. She wanted him to take
care of herthere, in that way.
He stared intently at the place between her legs for a long time. “Just as I
imagined: young and delicate, as pink as the inside of a seashell. The last,
best piece of cunt in the world. Sopping wet and all for me.” His rasp was
barely above a whisper, as if he was speaking to himself rather than to her.  
He cupped her between her legs, fingers digging into the soft hair, rubbing her
with slow, deliberate pressure. A finger reached inside of her then slid out
again, in and out, a delicate invasion, the drive and retreat easier each time.
She sighed, her will lax, her muscles coiling. He started rubbing some other
secret part of her: that startlingly sensitive bundle of nerves that made her
arch her body, made the liquid abundant until a tiny drop trickled down into
the curve of her buttocks, as ticklish as a tongue along her skin. He did it
until feminine, faint grunts that she would have never thought to utter in
another’s company tumbled from her throat.
“Bloody hell, I’m going to spurt,” he cursed in a shaky voice.  He nudged her
knees farther apart and fell on top of her. A hard erection covered in worsted
wool rubbed against the rise of her pubis and she felt his knuckles brush
against her folds as he fumbled with his belt. An image came to her, unbidden,
of seeing Hodor emerge naked from the godswood after bathing in one of the hot
pools. He had been massive, his manhood swinging long and heavy.
Sansa swallowed, blinked, breathed. The Hound was near as tall …
“Oh, you can take it, girl. Your cunt was made to drop squalling brats, it can
handle my cock.”
She wrinkled her face at him. He could try to be more gallant. What was wrong
with him? He was always saying the wrong things. She felt him rub her tummy, a
ridiculous gesture—she was a nervous maid, not a child with a bellyache. Yet it
calmed her, it was so oddly protective.
Then his hand was gone and he was rubbing something else against her: a very
naked, warm and hard male erection. He dropped it lower between her folds,
rubbing against the slit, up and down, up and down. She felt herself swollen,
so slick and wet. Empty. In that place where she certainly never felt empty
before.
Yes, no, yes, no. Do I want to?
“Just a dream,” the Hound said with a trace of bitterness. “A secret, private
game that doesn't count. You'll have your do-over in real life.”
He used the vee of his fingers to spread her apart and with a sure movement of
his hips, he began to push into her slowly, rocking himself back and forth. Her
eyes grew large. Oh it was huge! Smoother, rounder than his finger but so long
and thick that no part of his body could have matched it.Except for his entire
arm, she thought.
“Oh Gods … I can't …” Her voice was strained and she felt the emotion of
distress but there was only a little pain to accompany it. Just a faint burning
and an enormous pressure, a stretching of herself as if she was a too-small
glove. Then with one last push, he was inside her to the hilt. He let out a
great groaning burst of air as if she had hurt him, rather than the other way
around.
The Hound sat up, holding her legs against his shoulders, driving into her. The
wetness where they were joined became lavish, making slick, messy noises. The
faint burn continued, the smarting ache and the wetness telling her that he was
sliding in both her blood and her excitement. She watched him possess her,
wearing his fearsome snarling dog's head helm, fully clothed except for the
flashes of his manhood she could see as it moved in and out of her. He grabbed
at one of her breasts, squeezing it as he began to grunt, animal sounds in time
to the advance and withdrawal. She pictured it, the thick head of his manhood
moving inside of her, impaling her like a lance. Why, she should receive some
sort of reward: the crowd's applause and a champion's purse for swallowing it
whole.
Sansa felt her victory soon enough. He lifted her buttocks, grinding himself in
small tight circles before he let out a long, slow, satisfied moan and she felt
a warm burst of wetness. He shoved his hips fiercely two or three more times
before he slowly withdrew, her swollen tissues releasing him with slippery, wet
sounds.
He leaned on her, rubbing his seed onto her wincing nerves, his weight like a
ton of water, so heavy the nervous movements of her hands and squirming body
stilled completely. She laid under him, rattle-brained, her body stiffening
with each minute as if trying to find a comfortable position on a bed of nails.
All those songs and all those poems about something that had not lasted long.
Nor was it particularly sweet. At least not for her. That ill feeling—that she
should be exiled from the pleasure in which he seemed to be drowning—grew
stronger and stronger until it erupted in a small reprimanding snort.
He withdrew his hand and rolled off her, crouching on the side of the bed. She
watched him take off his helm. Sweat beaded his skin, his breath came in
sporadic rushes of recalled respiration, as if he had forgotten how to inhale
and exhale. Is there any more to the act of sexual love? I thought it would be
different … more magical, less messy. Already his seed was leaking out of her,
a milk-like flood that made her itchy. She hadn’t known about that, nobody had
told her.
Sansa touched him lightly on the back of his shoulder.Say something, please. He
made no movement to gather her up into his arms and whisper sweet tender words.
Instead, with his mailed hand, he brushed at her face as if he was brushing
dirt off a child.
“Summer’s blood, little bird.” The left side of his mouth twitched.
She felt a wet stickiness on her cheek, wiping it away with her thumb. It was a
light reddish-colored mixture—her blood, his seed. “You are so bizarre,” she
sniffed at him. Yet the self-deception was not invisible to her. She was the
strange one, the outlaw.
He turned away after she spoke to him. The transitional silence stretched into
an ugly little quiet. Sansa rose from the bed and walked towards a side table
in the tent where sat an upright mirror, washcloths and a basin filled with
flower-scented water. She washed her face and between her legs, all the while
staring at the mirror in which she could see his reflection behind her. He
still sat, holding his head in his hands as if a melee of thoughts and feelings
were raging inside of him.He is ugly, so ugly and hateful and crude. That I
should dream of laying with him … what is wrong with me? 
Sandor Clegane met her stare in his reflection. There was some inept, unspoken
speech brooding behind his eyes. “I've never hunted before,” he said in a low
voice.
She turned to face him with a confused look. A blush so deep it seemed to have
come from her bones rose up. His breeches still hung off his hips. He
wasincreasing. Again. His manhood betraying its pleading need by an imploring
kick.
“It's not hunting if you pay for it. I haven't ever fucked a woman sober
either. Did you like it?” he asked, frowning at her.
Sansa blinked, trying to think of a courteous response.
“It wasn't that bad. What was it, a minute, sixty seconds? Second for second
the closest to the Seven Heavens as I'll ever get.” He laughed—then tried to
cover his laugh with a cough when he saw the look on her face—sucking in air at
precisely the wrong moment, so that the coughing became real. She returned to
his side, patting his back until the fit ended.
“Are you alright, girl?” The question made the admission that it had been some
kind of ordeal. She nodded, though she did feel unsettled and confused, as if
she had survived a disaster. One greater than laying with the Hound. A
shipwreck, perhaps, from the look of him. His hair clung in damp wisps to his
face. She pulled a piece from his mouth and then cupped his scarred left cheek.
He bent his head to the back of her palm and pressed a soft kiss on her skin.
“The greatest disaster would be to fuck once and once poorly.”
No, she did not fancy Sandor Clegane. Not one bit. Then she heard herself say,
“Yes, I liked it. I’ll do it again if it would please you.”
His shoulders, face, eyes all rose a fraction together, suggesting surprise.
His mouth pulled into a wide smirk, parting to show large slightly yellow
teeth, a top one chipped. The smile made him look like a bear, one that would
devour her in a single bite and then pick his teeth clean.
With a twist, he turned her around so that her back faced him. Deftly, he
entwined her hands together, binding them tight with hempen rope. Protests came
to her lips but died there. Why ponder and fret? He isn’t real, she thought.
These were only hare and hound games: secret, private, with no substance and no
consequences. The Hound picked her up, cradling her in his arms as he carried
her out of the tent.
 
***** The Long Game *****
Chapter Notes
     This is an illustrated novella and is meant to be read in the manner
     of a real book with two pages side by side. As such, I've had to
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     platform.
     But here's the text only as well for A03
      
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as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch
           high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach
Sappho, Fragment 105A
 
They entered the common room of an inn, like any of those that she had stayed
in as she traveled south along the Kingsroad with her father. Arched stones,
wooden beams, roasting meat on a spit and a smoke from the roaring fire so
heavy she knew it would flavor the ale. The blazing red of the hearth vied in
intensity with the deep blush that was on her cheeks. For the inn was not
empty: it was filled with the voices and laughter of the men drinking there.
Sansa recognized them—Ser Waymar Royce and Ser Loras Tyrell and Lord Beric
Dondarrion and a dozen others more dimly remembered. They were men or boys that
at some point in her life she had fancied and could look back on those fancies
without recrimination or rancor.
The Hound carried her to the stool where Lord Beric was sitting. “My lady,” he
greeted her with gentle reverence as if she was a vision of the Maiden,
innocent and chaste.
The Lord of Blackhaven had come to King's Landing to fight in the Hand's
Tourney. He was no great warrior and no great tourney combatant but by chance,
her father had appointed him to lead an expedition to put down Gregor Clegane,
a giant notorious for his cruelty and battle prowess. No one could withstand
The Mountain but Beric Dondarrion had tried, over and over. Seeing him in this
smoky rustic inn wearing the golden halo of his heroism near blinded her. All
she could do was smile shamefacedly before she quickly turned to hide her
countenance in the muscled arms of the man who held her.
That same man unceremoniously kicked the stool out from under Lord Beric, the
marcher lord falling to the ground with a hard thud. The Hound then picked up
the stool and brought it over to one of the inn's pillars. He placed her on the
stool and bound her hands to the pillar. Her knees he pushed wide apart, taking
each leg and tying it to a stool leg. She squirmed and struggled, a fish caught
on a hook, until he took out a wide ribbon. If there was a draft in the inn,
she could not feel it, yet the striking anomaly fluttered in the firelight, a
red as dark as arterial blood. The Hound covered her eyes with it. “Stay,” he
said, while roughly kneading her breasts. He stopped his fondling and she heard
him walk away, his mean, mocking laughter trailing him, the sound like the
snarling of dogs in a pit.
Sansa began to tremble as she tested the snugness of her bonds and found there
was no give. She wanted to call for him but was at a loss for the words. She
never knew quite how to greet him: he had rebuked her for calling him lord and
for calling him Ser.
Her stoppered throat opened at last with “Sandor?” How easy the name was to
say, now that she had actually voiced it at last. Like a song to which everyone
knew the words.
From the corner of the inn, she heard the run of a woodharp and the night
seemed to fall abruptly into a swell of music, the bars of a smallfolk song. At
first, it was slightly disturbing before becoming out and out terrible as the
music grew louder, a riot of laughter and deep male voices singing in ever
deafening heights, building to some unknown climax. Was Butterbumps here too?
The horrifying thought gripped her, throwing her into hysteria. She struggled
harder, twisting, a wild feminine force possessing her as she strained to close
her thighs.
But she felt huge male hands holding them apart. A moment later, there was a
kiss from a warm mouth against her, a large tongue painting a long broad stroke
against her slit before delving inside of her. With a little mew, a kittenish
whimper, she began to cry, a sob threatening to break from her chest. Then she
felt the nuzzle of a face against her inner thigh. On her right thigh, the skin
was like hard leather, like scar tissue. The face then turned and nuzzled her
left thigh and she felt the rough scraping of a man's stubble. “My hands are
falling asleep,” Sansa whimpered, though it was the least of her objections.
“Arch your lower spine, like a bow,” he rasped. “Believe me, you’re in the most
comfortable position possible.”
And how many women have you tied up? She would have said the words if her
tongue hadn’t grown fat in her mouth. She wasn't sure if she wanted this and
only the knowledge that it was a silly dream kept her governable. She
swallowed, took a breath, then another. Breathing seemed to be something she
had to will herself to do. He took her silence for encouragement.
Behind her blindfold, she pinched her eyes closed, her head dropping to her
chin, her muscles coiling around the Hound’s head, her mind shrinking from the
exposure of her position even as her body responded. It felt wrong. An
ethereal, otherworldly sensation from a foreign place where people made a
religion out of sexual pleasure. Myranda Royce had told her of this act—it was
a ritual practice between supplicants and the high priestess in the temple of
the Lysene goddess of love.
Lady Myranda had once shown Alayne a small painting of the goddess, depicted as
a beautiful naked young woman with auburn colored hair, rising from the waves
on a seashell. The older girl had laughed uproariously at her mortification as
the painting, save for the hair color, bore an uncanny resemblance to the shy
and prim Alayne. The naked goddess was also stamped on Lysene coins and
visitors from beyond the Narrow Sea coming to see Lord Petyr would sometimes
raise their eyebrows waggishly upon taking note of his baseborn daughter. It
was all very embarrassing. And secretly tantalizing. Sansa did not know if the
Hound was aware of the cult of the Lysene goddess but he was certainly an
enthusiastic practitioner of its rituals.  
Hands slid beneath her buttocks, pulling her closer, raising her higher as if
she were a wineskin that would slake his thirst. He buried his face in her
curls, breathing deeply through the dark auburn hair. Then he began to lap at
her with his tongue, licking slowly upwards from the mouth of her womb to where
the skin was folded. He sucked at that hard little button of flesh, over and
over, making Sansa gasp at the sensation. He stimulated her so persistently it
was mildly unpleasant, while also being overpoweringly irresistible.
She pressed herself harder against his mouth. His tongue stabbed into her,
dipping in deep, warm, wet, before he replaced his tongue with his fingers,
cool and mailed, first one and then two. He moved them inside of her in a
deliberate mockery of the sexual act, while his tongue flicked her in firm
quick motions. Her whole body lit up, a prickling heat that had its source
between her legs but whose coiled intensity was felt everywhere … from her
toes, up her spine, out to the clenching of her bound hands.
Even her eyes felt hot. Sansa imagined what this depraved tableau would look
like to an observer. She was naked, squatting on a stool, her thighs spread
wide open, her buttocks imprisoned within a pair of strong hands. She was a
blind captive, her feet and her hands tethered, her auburn hair falling about
her, eyes bound with red silk while a hideous hulking man crouched below her,
laving at her womanhood. All around them a rowdy crowd of drunken men watched
her; watched her moan in paroxysms of longing that sounded pathetically
grateful to her own ears as the Hound's devouring mouth supped at her.
“Oh, oh—I’m going to pass out.” The feeling of physical strain wasenormous,
like holding back a heavy wagon on the steep incline of a mountain.
“That’s not what it’s called, little bird,” he chuckled. How was he even able
to speak as his mouth was doing that? Her skin prickled; she had a baffling
sense of nothing being where she had put it.
Her confusion was forgotten as the crowd rose to full burst with the raucous
singing of the song’s chorus. The maid so fair, but he licked the honey, from
her hair! Her hair! Her hair! The song seemed to whip the Hound into a frenzy,
his mouth clamping down on her, his lips wrapped around just that vulnerable,
vincible button.
An orgy of sucking that made her muscles contract and contract, tighter and
tighter. She gasped as the good feeling rolled over her, sending quivers of
contractions radiated outwards from between her legs. It made her nipples
pucker into hard pebbles, her skin break out into gooseprickles. Behind the
blindfold, her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably like the wings of a butterfly.
The crowd cheered the Hound as loudly as the day he won the Hand's Tourney. And
off they went, the bear! The bear! And the maiden fair! The chorus came to
rousing conclusion, the noises of the crowd rose and fell, wine jugs smashed
together and broken in drunken exultation.
She cried out when a stranger touched her, brushing her legs with what felt
like a flagon. The Hound grabbed at it as it passed her knees and she heard him
gulping it down. She could almost picture it. Thickened wine, stored in a dark
bottle. Dornish sour. She heard him laugh, a long raspy laugh that echoed
through the inn as he smacked his lips with the sound of quenched thirst before
he emptied the contents of the flagon below her tummy. He licked her one last
time, lapping up the wine, making a playful noise against her mound like a dog
with its bone, grrrr. She heard him rise from his crouched position with a
grunt of achievement, victorious.
She was left sitting on her stool testing her bonds, her face so hot she knew
she must be as deeply flushed as if she was heavily intoxicated. It was if the
strongwine he had doused her with had somehow worked itself into her
bloodstream. Her pelvic muscles continued to quiver and convulse, nerve endings
twitching like mad. A warmth suffused her entire body but was most concentrated
below her tummy, between her legs, a wonderful liquidy languor that smelled of
Dornish sour.
As the good feeling dimmed, the noise of the inn became harder for Sansa to
ignore. There were broken fragments of conversation that she strained to listen
to but could not understand, voices speaking in sounds that mimicked the
cadence of the Common Tongue but used no words of which she knew the meaning.
Tavern songs like Bessa the Barmaid and The Dornishman's Wife would rise and
fall like the ebb and flow of the tide along with peals of boisterous male
laughter. A harsh, low laugh floated out with these, a laugh she would have
known anywhere.
Her ears perked up when she caught it, moving her head to decipher the
direction from whence it came. It sounded distant but genuine for once, though
she definitely did not care for his sense of humor should this be an example of
it. Her lower lip trembled. The fear of being abandoned eclipsed even her
shame. She could hear the scraping of many pairs of boots on the rushes near
her.
Dark bodies gathered closely so that their smell encroached, an odor of horses
and rawhide and ale. She felt their eyes upon her, their heat finding an
answering heat in the blush that covered her body. She knew where they looked
the hardest: at the apex of her thighs so obscenely open, the hair covered in
droplets of wine, her opening slick from her excitement. The stares, her
supreme immodesty, hisabsence … the apprehension became as palpable as the
smoke from the firepit.
“Sandor … Sandor?” she cried quietly, then louder and more angrily. “Ser
Sandor!”
She heard the sound of a stool scraping on the floor, pulling up close to her.
Large hands dug into the flesh at the base of her head, massaging with gentle
fingertips, arranging then re-arranging her hair until it fell like a curtain
in front of her, her nakedness concealed like a bride on her wedding night. The
hands moved underneath the curtain of her hair, encircling her neck, feeling
the gooseprickles on her upper arms, fondling her breasts.
“I love your teats. Makes a man wish he had never been weaned.” He started
bouncing her breasts as if they were balls he was trying to juggle, up and
down, with the smooth worn pads of his fingertips. What a silly boy, she
thought. A boy of four and ten. No… she recanted, thinking of the maturity of
her brothers Robb and Jon. Those were the boys of four and ten she had known.
This one was like a boy of eight, like Sweetrobin.
There were yells for meat and drink from across the room, making Sansa realize
she was hungry and thirsty too. She blew a tuft of hair from her cheek in
exasperation as the hands continued to fondle her breasts, clutching at them
greedily before kneading them. “You have no shame, Lady Sansa. Only
imagination.”
She felt his thumb move to trace the bottom ridge of her lower lip, rolling it
down. He held it still for a moment before releasing it with a wet pop. “I like
to play too.” A light male chuckle. “Open your mouth …”
Sansa made an odd frown, half of her lips moving up, half moving down.
“No dirty tricks,” he chortled, slapping his hands on his knees.
She opened her mouth and Arbor Gold, cool and tart, was squirted from a
wineskin into it. She drank it down then felt a piece of the roasting meat, a
herbed lamb, touch her tongue. One after the other she ate, the pieces of meat
always tender and juicy, the best of morsels. They continued to eat together in
tandem as she heard Sandor chewing and gulping down wine between his feedings
of her. It was a bizarre mockery of courtly table manners where the lord would
feed his lady from his own plate. Where the lovers would drink from the same
cup and kiss between their bites and sips.
She heard him bite into a crisp apple before it was pressed against her lips.
He gave her the side that he had just bitten into and she took a crunch out of
the half-eaten apple, wet from his mouth. A shudder of excitement ran through
her. How strange this act seemed to be, so dark and forbidden. It was all too
close to her real life where sharing an apple with a man held both erotic
allure and the threat of her own downfall.
The feverish, fleeting encounter came fluttering up, like a winged beetle
escaping from the closed cage of memory. A hedge knight who had visited the
Gates of the Moon, honest and kind-looking with the face of a Northman. Take
this and know that I've shared a sweet with a kind and gracious lady, he had
said as he brushed the golden smooth skin of an apple against her hot cheeks.
She knew his particular variety by taste, by name. White Winter Pearmain; the
name spilled out of her at once, the way when upon seeing a childhood
friend—unmet for years—one pulls out a name along with a gangling thread of
forgotten history.
Alayne had helped Maester Colemon torture apple trees to grow, grafting the
Southron varieties—the Costard, the Nonpareil, the White Joaneting, the Royal
Russet—she could recite those names off like heraldry. But the knight’s apple
had been different. The taste of windfall from the orchards of Winterfell.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet only by the virtue of Northern honey bees. Sansa
had felt a foolish desire to fold, to tell the knight all and beg for his aid
but Lord Petyr had called him away. She looked for him later that evening but
the hedge knight was nowhere to be found, another would-be savior disappearing
into the mist.
Alayne had eaten the apple, alone, in her bedchamber. As if it was a secret and
forbidden thing. The girl’s body bending over the apple, savoring the sight,
the smell, the taste, all the while exhorting herself to go slowly, to hold on
to the moment that once consumed would be gone forever. 
That girl moved now in a different sort of motion. She straightened, throwing
herself at Sandor Clegane.
Kissing him.
His lips were a little rough, chapped but sticky with flavor. Wholly marvelous.
The enchanted taste of White Winter Pearmain, the best wine and memories as
sweet and as sad as music.
Their teeth bumped gently together, making them both smile. He sucked on her
lower lip briefly, wiping with his thumb at the wetness he’d left. His kisses
were so light, the kisses of a boy, gentle and sincere. Sansa hadn't expected
that—his first kiss, that night of the battle, had been angry and brutal.
Sometimes, she had lain awake at night indulging in that dirty habit of biting
her lips until they bruised, trying to recall the cruel press of his mouth
against hers. The left side burned away, the right side plump and sensual as if
it were sensitive enough to tell the differences between grains of salt …
“Kiss me. Like you did the first time,” she said. How funny was the lilt of her
voice, she thought. Coy. Doeish. As if she wanted to invite more roughness,
more dominion.
Nothing happened for the length of several heartbeats. She could feel the
weight of his stare; he could look at her in a way that would make her go
suddenly cold. Then she heard him snort, “As you wish, my lady.”
One hand slid up to the back of her neck under her hair. He tipped her head.
When he kissed her, he held her cheek, stroking it with his thumb even as he
planted his tongue deep. They kissed for what seemed like hours, greedy,
wallowing kisses, until the noise of the inn died down, leaving them lost in
their own world.
Sansa squirmed like mad, she couldn't keep still. It was as if he was touching
her all over, even though they were just kissing. Her nipples tightened, the
sensation challenging her to ask him to lower his mouth, to kiss them with
those peculiar lips. Her muscles clenched, swelled, folds growing thickly
together, welcoming,wishing that whatever he did to her before, he should
please do so again. Images of taking him down on top of her, his massive thick
manhood moving inside of her, flickered through her brain. She wanted to lay
down with him so very badly. Yet how she also wanted the luscious kisses to go
on and on, that they would drink from each other trapped in eternal time.
What a doomed tragic rivalry. Her mind acknowledging that what she really
wanted were more kisses. Sweet kisses from a tender boy because kisses were
anchored to her reality, to what she was ready for in the waking world. While
her body beguiled her to rush headlong, the heat between her legs hissed,
whispered, oh how painfully she yearned for this hulking brute to bring her to
her knees. On the ground. In the dirt …  
“Ah, ah …” she planted little hard pants into his mouth when she felt his
calloused fingerpads drift along her knees then up her thighs. He quickly
dropped his hands away in response. The retreat made her audibly groan and she
pressed her lips against his neck where she felt his pulse, felt it beating
fast and hard.
“You're shaking,” she said. He seemed to understand the tension inside of her,
to feel it in kind.
“An excess of enjoyment,” he replied, his voice quiet and rough. “This feels
good. Too good.” That he wasn't pressing her for more surprised her.
“Do you want to … ?”
“The word is come, you're asking me if I want to come. No. Not yet.”
He then spoke with a great breath of relief as if he was unburdening thoughts
chewed over for hours. “Look, you're pretending now that this is real, not a
game anymore. You're a girl of four and ten who is titillated by sharing an
apple with a man. If it was real, I'd wait … well, I'd try to wait. Until you
were ready for it, until you were older.”
“Why?” she said, astonishment making her speech blunt. She found it hard to
fathom that he had any morals to restrain himself. He had always disabused her
of her faith in his goodness, in his honor. Sandor Clegane, in his own opinion,
was no true knight.
“Because if I took you, fucked you like I want to, you might come to regret it
almost immediately, even if your body likes it at first. You'd look at me,
despise me as a lowly brute. But if I gave you time to think it over, to come
into your desire slowly and on your own, the weight of the blame would rest
squarely on your shoulders. Once you bore that weight, you might never want to
throw it off. Anything could happen that way. I wouldn't get to fuck you once,
I'd get to fuck you for my lifetime. You want to play games, so do I. I want to
play the long game with you.”
Sansa had to snort, even if it was unladylike. Yet she understood the source of
his restraint, a mixture of great want and great terror, combined with the
newborn wisdom of an untried seducer. The man had demonstrated a keen
understanding of her before: when he had knelt between her and the long plunge,
eighty feet to the bailey, that she had wanted to take with Joffrey the day
Wormlips had made her look at her father’s tarred head.
“I'm older here,” Sansa whispered in his good ear. “Older than my years, and
you, you're younger than yours. There's no inequality between us in dreams.”
He kissed her, feasting dreamily on her mouth, then fed her more Arbor Gold.
She wanted it, swallowed the wine eagerly, giggling and stroking his tongue
with hers. Alayne never permitted herself to drink with a greater purpose than
to quench thirst in real life where the world was eager to teach sharp lessons
to girls, especially baseborn girls, who lost control. There was no fear of
that here. She did not believe Sandor Clegane would let any harm come to her or
make her do anything she would regret—his little speech had assured her of
that.
“More wine, sweet plumwine,” she murmured. She heard him squirt wine into his
mouth and then felt him do the same into hers. They kissed with the very sweet
and very strong flavor of plumwine on their lips. She wanted the golden warm,
tingly freedom of intoxication, the slackening of her inhibitions. Why,
anything could happen that way.
 
 
***** Dog with Two Tails *****
guard her
bridegrooms
kings of cities
Sappho, Fragment 161
 
Sansa arched her back as he moved to her breasts, his mouth wide open on one as
he bounced and caressed the other. Oh, the pleasure of it made her hum. Her
fingers twitched with the maddening desire to touch his face, to feel the
leathery skin of his left cheek sucking in as he drew on her nipple. Behind the
pillar, she felt his fingers entwining with hers. Sansa caressed his short
fingernails, the wrinkles on his knuckles, the creases in his palms. She felt a
sudden giddy thrill when she discovered the exact area on his wrists where the
skin was no longer smooth but hairy, the hairs thick and wiry—so very
different, so very masculine compared to the faint downy softness that covered
her own arms.
She concentrated hard, trying to memorize the features of his hands, failing to
notice that another pair of hands were cutting the cords of her bonds. There
was no time to enjoy her freedom as her wrists were quickly ensnared, pulled to
her front and once more tied together.
“Now,” he said aggressively, his voice urgent and low, as if born from a
distance. “My cock’s so fucking hard I could use it as a battering ram.”
She heard the sound of a stool being kicked away. She felt Sandor’s arms
digging into her sides, pushing her up against the pillar, while other arms,
hardly felt at all, gripped her legs, guiding them so that they encircled his
waist. A hand reached down between them and worsted wool crumpled, caught only
by his spread-legged stance.
“You want this,” he rasped in a low, faraway voice.
It wasn’t a question, yet it demanded her answer.
“You want this?” he asked softly, pressing his lips, plump on one side, burned
away on the other, against her throat. That spot where the pulse was beating,
beating, skipping: yes, yes, please …
“Yes.”
And then he was guiding himself inside of her. She sucked in her breath—would
she ever grow accustomed to it? He felt as massive as before, her nerves down
there spiking at the burning, wincing thrill. He rocked himself in, once, twice
and on the third time, it seemed as if her body all but pulled him in,
swallowing him up. She let out a startled moan, the back of her head smacking
hard against the pillar.
It hurt: his size, the odd angle, her bruised head but the pinch of pain did
nothing to diminish her pleasure. She squeezed him, muscles clenching, holding
him inside, tightening around him. They stayed like that, perfectly frozen, for
a few moments. Oh it was right, so blessedly right, that he should be where he
was. She leaned forward, finding his mouth and kissing him wetly.
He ended the kiss with a sharp thrust up into her, pushing her against the
pillar, his head falling into the crook of her neck. His fingers drifted low,
sliding to the place where they were joined, witnesses to the slick entrance
and exit of each stroke as if he needed to be convinced of her acquiescence.
Perhaps due to her blindness, it seemed as if all her other senses were
heightened. She felt the smooth silk of her blindfold, the tease of his pubic
hair, the worn wood of the pillar behind her. His tongue licked her jawline
just as his hips pulled back, then pushed—Oh Gods be good. She ground her hips
hard against his to get closer to the sensation.
With her legs still about his waist, he carried her away, one hand supporting
her hips, one hand cradling her head. They kissed as he continued to thrust,
working her back and forth. Sansa heard the brief sound of fabric flapping and
then felt herself being laid down on a bed, luxuriantly covered in what could
only be lion pelts. He kissed her more deeply and she groaned, kissing him back
in response. She pulled him closer with her feet, toes digging into his muscled
buttocks, heels and calves sliding against his skin with each thrust.
“Move her to the edge. I want to kiss her now.”
Sandor pulled out of her suddenly. A whimper of disappointment formed but had
no time to escape from her mouth as he lifted her whole body forward, so her
head lolled off the edge of the bed. She felt her hair brushing the floor for a
moment before her head was cradled by a hand, gauntleted and cool.
A mailed thumb landed at the edge of her lip, rolling it down and she felt the
press of a mouth against hers in a deep kiss. As if in tandem, she felt another
thumb, one of bare skin, touch her between her legs. The press of the two
thumbs sent a shocking physical rush of blood to her brain, making her go rigid
with fright.
“Calm down,” he said. “The Dothraki Kings share with their Kingsguard, there's
no shame in it for the girl. You've already enjoyed servicing us both.”
Behind her blindfold, her eyes grew wide with fear. She had heard of this awful
practice, that a horselord, a khal, shared even wives with the men sworn to
protect him, his bloodriders.
“Who are you sharing me with?” she asked, her brow furrowing deeper into a
horrified frown. As far as she knew, there was no man Sandor Clegane would call
friend, let alone a bloodrider.
She heard him laugh his deep, dirty chuckle, “The Hound.”
From the opposite direction, “You're so dirty-minded, Sansa. I like it!”
An ocean of relief flooded her veins and she let out a long airy breath. A
flurry of conflicting emotions ran across her face before settling on a look of
maidenly indignation.
“I am not. It's you!” she cried, kicking out at him, trying to put the weight
of the blame on him, even though this was her dream. He dodged, then gripped
the leg that would have struck him if possible. 
He was still licking her toes when a sheepish, befuddled smile crept onto her
face.
The Hound kissed her forehead as Sandor slid his hands beneath her buttocks,
rolling his hips and planting himself deep, until his pubic bone thumped
against her.
Sansa felt so warm and knew she must be blushing furiously, the blood of her
body throbbing just below the surface of her skin. Her face was red with shame
but her heart leapt into a happy rhythm.
As happy as a dog with two tails.
The Hound kissed her, his tongue moving inside of her mouth in unhurried
exploration while his thumb remained on her lower lip. The thumb then journeyed
inside of her mouth, so that both his tongue and his thumb were penetrating
her.
Sandor began to gently rub her and she could feel the tremors running through
his body, hear his short deep grunts coming ever faster. A knot built somewhere
below her tummy, still faintly painful, yet it made her squirm in pleasure. Her
body caught, ice and fire, frozen and burning at the same time. Abruptly, the
Hound ended his kisses. Sansa's head hung upside down off the bed for a moment
before he again cradled it with one hand, while with the other she could hear
the sound of him opening his breeches.
“Do you want to taste me, little bird?”
Sansa pictured licking his thumb … and she knew what service he was requiring
of her. Lady Myranda had whispered of it, so dark and dirty, during their
pillow talks. But the girl shrank back from the duty no gently bred lady would
ever be expected to perform. She wet her lips to say no.
No was the answer but her tongue had grown fat and it wouldn’t move in her
mouth. Instead she pressed her lips inward, though she didn’t know if she truly
meant to protest.
Sandor sniggered, while the Hound gave an indignant grunt. “It is
onlycourteous! After all my services for you. A lady must never forget her
courtesies,” he rasped. In that deep grumbly-growly voice, a voice that made
her idiotically malleable to anything he wanted. Anything at all.
Decisions, decisions, they hung in the air, demanding her attention and before
her brain could decide, her mouth was opening. First just a little, then as
wide as she could when she felt Sandor's massive member grow even thicker
inside of her.
“You look like a fledgling ready for supper,” the Hound said, letting out a
deep, slow chuckle as he gently tipped her head back. “I won’t keep my little
bird waiting.”
Sansa tensed, waiting, breathless …
And then it hit her … a ball of spit, landing on her tongue before rolling down
her throat.
She heard them both burst into raucous raspy laughter, deep guffaws from the
belly that lasted for far too long. She wanted to slap him but he had her at
his mercy, legs held, hands bound, blind and helpless.
“Oh, aren't you funny! Just full of japes,” she cried.
“I'm awful. Now pull your knees to your chin, girl. He don’t want to feel
anything except cunt.”
Sansa whimpered and groaned and complied. Sandor renewed his thrusting, the bed
shaking from both his laughter and his movements.
A vein in her neck began to beat. His spit. It had been utterly tasteless,
horrible and … a tiny terror blossomed, a dangerous thought was born in her
brain, enough to tie her insides in knots:
Men were delicious.
Well, at least Sandor Clegane was delicious.
It was her last moment of coherence. The knot below her tummy became tight. His
spit had doused her, pleasure-soaking her nerves with a substance more
intoxicating than plumwine. She gasped. “Oh, oh, ohhh.”
For a second, it seemed as if she could fly, the featherbed rising with her,
lifting her back until it arched—that good feeling becoming hideously strong.
So strong it hurt, so good she broke apart into more little feminine cries of
oh, oh, oh that the Hound's mouth, positioned upside down from hers, caught
from her lips while his mailed hands held both her cheeks firmly in place.
Sandor drove into her once, twice, three times, then bucked violently, filling
the air with a succession of stuttering grunts, low and guttural, as if
wrenched from his chest. She had no time to struggle with her own feelings
before the Hound’s hands hooked into her underarms.
“My turn to get my cock wet,” he rasped.
Sandor shoved him, hard enough that Sansa could hear the Hound stumbling
backward a step.
“Savage cunny … as tight as fists wringing out a sodden rag,” he muttered
incoherently. He held her possessively, thrusting into her as long as his
erection endured, before releasing her into the waiting arms of the Hound.
The Hound lifted her up, twisting her around, as easily as if she was a rag
doll. Before she knew it, she was sitting on his lap astride him, her bound
hands encircling his neck, his thick member sliding into her. She was so wet
that his penetration was a velvet-smooth ripple.
“Like a horse, ride him, ride me, like a horse,” Sandor muttered from behind
her, grabbing her buttocks and motioning her to move her hips up and down.
She set a leisurely slow pace: the good feeling, that perfect satisfaction had
peaked inside of her and she wanted to bask in the lingering warmth of its sun.
The Hound leaned back and she could hear the creak of the bed as his hand
splayed palm down on it. He braced himself so he could lever his hips, touching
her innermost spot with the tip. Sansa could feel the strength of the Hound’s
eyes upon her, hear his steady breathing—an animal calm.
A mailed finger traced her cheekbone. “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t
draw breath to beg or squeal,” he said after a long pause. The Hound punctuated
this with a change in pace, hard and fast strokes, his hands moving to her
waist and back to pin her in place. In and out, in and out, as her breasts
bounced in rhythm.
A pair of hands reached from behind to massage her nipples. Around and around
as if he was slowly polishing her. “You have to rub her between the legs while
you fuck her. That button is like a little cock. Pay attention to her pleasure,
dog. That way she'll keep coming back to you for more.”
There was something funny here: it made her giggle to hear Sandor's thoughts
spoken aloud to the Hound. Who would imagine such a thing?
She stopped laughing when a cold, mailed hand slid between her legs, the thumb
suddenly cocked to press against that hard bundle of flesh every time she slid
down. From behind her, the upper curve of her spine was grazed with a very warm
and very hard, perfectly beautiful—cock—whispered her deranged brain. “Sandor,”
she breathed shakily.
“Come on, come on, come on,” the Hound muttered rapidly like a madman. “Sing
for me, little bird.” Confusion swirled inside of her. It was a very
distracting request, her thoughts so muddled, a woman possessed in every sense.
She was out of her mind; why, she could barely remember her own name.
“Lady Sansa,” the Hound’s laugh was like a loud, irritating bark. She felt his
fingers slipping and sliding against her as she tried gracelessly to keep up
with the pace he liked. “Feels good, huh, girl?”
Sansa couldn’t see yet she felt the Hound’s stupid grin.
She didn’t bother to say anything. It was good and she felt herself grinning
back at him, itchy with mindless excitement. She had the absurd desire to shout
out his name—Sandor! Oh Sandor! —the inelegance of lovers’ talk at last making
sense to her. She was surprised by the responsiveness of her own body. A touch
of his mailed hand, a hot caress against her back, was sending her off,
lighting her up as if she was a dim room he had barged into to set all the
candles aflame.
Sandor took the palm that was curved on her ribcage and held it in front of her
lips. “Spit,” he said. She did as he demanded, both aroused and repelled at the
thought of his hands upon himself, slick with the wetness from her mouth.
He knelt beside her, his teeth scoring her shoulder, while the Hound continued
to thrust his hips against hers with rough, frantic motions. She was
surrounded, a man in front, a man behind, strong arms holding her tightly as
two mouths left wet marks on her skin.I wish I could grow as small as a seed, a
tiny mustard seed, and he would swallow me and carry me in his body, safe and
warm from all harm, she thought, overwhelmed by the sensation of being held so
completely.  The good feeling had peaked but now it was mounting again. Oh, she
couldn't stand it, her head tossing as her body began to quiver. There was such
a surge inside of her, an old, animal memory racing in her blood …
In Winterfell, she had owned a mare, a gentle bay. Sansa had taken the mare
hawking one day and while following her hawk, they had come across a ravine not
seen until it was too late. The mare was a good jumper, leaping over the ditch
instinctively. The thrill of that unexpected leap—for one weightless,
precarious moment—then the dark and dizzying collapse as hooves thudded against
the hard-packed earth. It made her gasp, a breathless shock of pleasure, a
sudden hard twist of her hips. She was no longer riding her bay mare but a
giant black courser. At the nudge of her heels, the stallion broke into a full
gallop across a vast landscape of plains and steppes as a sea of grass blurred
against the shifting clouds of the bright blue sky. She rode him hard now,
thrilled at the feel of his muscles rippling underneath her, all around her,
only her power holding him in rein. The sinews along his great bull neck
trembled. She moaned as she traced them with her tongue, the veins there as
thick as on a swollen horse’s c—
“Fuck! Fuck!”—she had clamped down so tightly on him that he seized in a
stunned but instant halt. She could feel Sandor’s seed, ropes of warm liquid,
trickle down her spine. The Hound’s hips arching up and up. An agonized rasp
ruptured from out his chest—between her legs, the delicate, fibrillating pulse
of his manhood. “Bloody hell, just one more minute,” the Hound cursed—for the
beginning of the end of what he wanted to last for another minute or for
another Age.
She sucked hard on the skin of his neck.Even his sweat tastes sweet, Sansa
thought as the good feeling came again. Not as strong as the first time but
still delicious, tightening, loosening, sending fluttery kisses that made him
clutch onto her like a dying man; his grunts smothered in her hair. Her spasms
repeated. Sustained. Then it was only an echo in their throbs.
 
***** Honey-Sweet *****
what country girl seduces your wits
wearing a country dress
not knowing how to pull the cloth to her ankles
Sappho, Fragment 57
 
When Sansa came back into being, she found herself immersed in a tub. Water
strewn with petals lapped against her breasts, dampness pulling down her hair,
heat making her cheeks warm. And the glow of the light, a gentle amber, telling
her that there must be a countless number of candles all around her. She was
still blindfolded, her hands bound.
It was a relief. She needed the dash of pretense. To make believe that she was
virtue compromised when in truth, she was a bizarre girl who had taken normal
desires and twisted them in disgusting ways. A girl who liked perversities in
the breathless dark with him.
“Sandor,” the girl giggled. She shook her hair back from her shoulders so he
could look at her, see the loveliness of her naked candlelit beauty. No one
answered and the only sound she heard was theshuh, shuh, shuh of the water as
she moved about in the immense tub. She stretched out, floating in the dim
warmth, her disappointment sharp.
The thick fragrant vapors rose until they filled her nostrils and without
seeing the petals, Sansa knew their color. Their crimson residue swirled
sweetly in the air, making her think of the very first rose a man had bestowed
upon her. A red rose, while all the other ladies had been handed a white one.
She had been so certain then that the color of the rose had meant something,
that it had meant everything to the pure, beautiful, gallant Ser Loras. In her
fantasies, he would give her a red rose as he crowned her Queen of Love and
Beauty, saying over and over … 
“Sweet lady, no victory is half so beautiful as you.”
Her head swung towards the voice and she heard the fuss of clothing being
kicked violently aside. Splosh, the reverberations of water being displaced as
he waded in, one foot at a time. Splosh, splosh, splosh.  
A man scooped her up, resting her buttocks on top of his firm thighs. He
wrapped his arms around her, digging the fingers of his left hand into her
waist. She heard the fingers of his right hand run through the water.
“Red roses … are those your favorite flowers?” he said after a long pause.
Sansa nodded, Ser Loras’ red rose splendidly colorful  in her mind. “Common as
dirt. You and every witless peasant girl,” the Hound snorted as he rubbed a
petal against her cheekbone, hard enough that the scent insinuated itself into
the beads of moisture on her skin.
The comment rankled her. They were common. Commonplace flowers meant to express
commonplace emotions: beauty, desire, courtship, love.
“If you could but see that boy now. Loras Tyrell would make you soak your
smallclothes”—the Hound’s left arm dived between her legs, molding and cupping
her— “with piss.”
He cackled at his own feeble wit. She wrinkled her face at him.
“He’s even uglier than I am. Boiled in oil at the siege of Dragonstone.” His
thumb slipped inside of her, pressing against the tail end of her spine. “Fed
the goat while thinking of that bugger, did you?” the Hound whispered in the
crook of her neck. His touch smarted; it did not seem to be meant to excite
her, rather to affirm that he had been there.
She had never imagined anything as grown-up as laying with Ser Loras. The
satisfaction of her physical desires were no more than her fingers should have
the good fortune and sweet fate to caress the warm skin of his smooth chest
underneath his tunic as she stood on her toes to kiss his smiling lips. She
would drift into a reverie in her bed at night thinking about the Knight of
Flowers, her brain feeding her memories piece by piece: the sweetness of his
laugh, the dimples at the corner of his mouth, his wonderful eyes—golden, warm,
so luminous in her mind that she could seemingly read just by their light. In a
way, those feelings, the little girl’s castles-in-the-air, were as vivid and as
intense as that other thing.
“You are too”—she hesitated—“advanced in age to understand.” The Hound must be
twenty-nine, she thought, counting back from the year of Robert’s Rebellion.
“Oh, that’s bloody sweet. She thinks you’re some balding, toothless mongrel,
pitiable yet still formidable enough to be feared,” the Hound growled.
“Stop your whining, dog. She let you fuck her. You win.”
“Sandor!” She squirmed away from the Hound’s vulgar invasion and collided with
the man.
Sandor took her face in his hands. “Little bird, your skin is so charming in
this heat. Wholesome and pretty and bright on the eyes.” 
“Peaches-and-cream begging to be drowned in my seed,” the Hound laughed. He
continued to chatter but Sansa’s smile did not fade; she hardly heard him
anymore, his coarse words given half an ear’s attention.
“Complexion of a babe …” Sandor’s voice was low, luxuriously deep. He licked
her, following the same path along her cheekbones the Hound had drawn with the
petal. Her smile broadened, became uninhibited, sweetly thrilled. She liked
being looked at, admired, flattered, especially by this man. I wonder if I
shall ever understand this about myself, she thought.I am so needy, like a
bastard beggar-girl on the street, willing to be thrown anything.
“A Rose ugly enough to scare the shit out of a privy. The Tyrells are just
Lannisters with flowers …” the Hound’s rasp intruded. 
“I know.” Her expression went blank completely. Alayne still had the hair net
with all its murderous black amethysts in place, save the one that Lady Olenna
had plucked. The girl had it hidden away underneath the same chest where she
kept her books of chivalry. Alayne’s father had never inquired about its
whereabouts. Perhaps he didn’t think there was a need.
“Complexion of a babe … and a babe’s longing to trust,” Sandor said gruffly. A
stillness descended upon them and there was a hushed, tingly feeling in the
air; even the undulating water made no sound as if the entire world was holding
its breath. Sansa kissed Sandor’s eyelids closed and thought of the first
faces, the familiar faces she had seen since infancy: her parents, her
brothers, Arya. Then she thought of the first loves, those foreign
enchantments, invading her inner life until they gave full form to it. Ser
Waymar and Ser Loras and … and the monstrous golden Joffrey. The girl had
fashioned herself by choosing them.
Her lips moved to the heavy brow, the gaunt cheek of the right side. “The pain
must have been terrible. If I burn my finger, I weep like a child.” She wanted
to throw her arms around his boyhood self and hug him to her breast and blow
cool air on his wounds. “Does it still hurt here?” She kissed the craters and
fissures of the left jawbone.
“I can’t feel a thing,” Sandor said flatly.
“I feel it. Bloody hell. I feel it,” the Hound.
Sansa leaned over, circling her tongue at that very spot, wet under the
dripping fall of his hair. Her face reddened as she felt the Hound grow thick
and rigid against the inside of her thigh. She rubbed herself gently against
his shaft before angling her buttocks, bending forward over her knees so that
he could enter her if he pleased. But they pulled her to her feet instead, the
motion so quick that it made her graceless, her feet slipping along the bottom
of the tub. Sandor gripped her legs to support her, then buried his head
against her tummy, appealingly shy all of a sudden.
“You’re … you’re very skilled at kissing,” she giggled. She could feel the heat
of Sandor’s mouth moving low on her tummy. He was skilled. Too skilled. She
pictured a multitude of girls, all resembling her: their tousled auburn hair,
their dissolute blue eyes, their fleshy mouths with full, wide, open, crimson
lips. The thought of them made her a little despondent.
“I’ve never kissed anyone,” Sandor grumbled.
“I wouldn’t want to anyway! Why would I?” the Hound rasped. She could hear the
anger in the tightness of his voice. “Some slut in whose mouth and cunt a
hundred other men have spent themselves? Piss on that.”
Sansa was quiet, not quite sure what to say to gentle the fury he was devoted
to sustaining.
A deep chortle burst from Sandor’s lips, as sudden as quail flushed from the
undergrowth. The Hound bent her spine forward ever so slightly. Her buttocks
were spread open and a kiss was laid there, in that place. “Don't … I don't
like it, I'm dirty.” She tried to lunge away but thick arms held her.
“You're not dirty. Where do you think we are? We’re in a bath, girl.” The mouth
continued to lick her. “What does her arsehole taste like, dog?”
“Clean skin,” the Hound said, his mouth smirking against her buttocks. He
sniffed at her, like an animal. “I've never been with a girl so clean. I want
to kiss you all over. Tear you apart, lick your liver, lick your lungs. Knead
your entrails.” He grabbed her buttocks suddenly with his big hands and she
felt him make the symbol of a heart. “Fuck, I'm in love! This arse is so
pretty, hard to believe it shits.” He smacked her bottom playfully. “Open your
legs wider, girl.” 
“You musn’t do this,” she said, even as she widened her stance. His kisses were
tingly but strangely relaxing.
“I'm your dog. I'm Sansa's dog,” the Hound crooned between his licks.
“I didn't think girls like you existed. You're from another world. A better
place than this one … you're from the Moonmaid,” said Sandor.
Maester Luwin had taught her the stars as a girl in Winterfell. She could find
all the seven wanderers sacred to the Faith. On the twilight of Alayne’s
nameday, she and Lady Myranda had climbed to the highest parapet of the Gates
of the Moon.
The stars she had seen as a child she still saw, only fewer, dimmer. She
pointed out the Ice Dragon, the Shadowcat, the King's Crown and the shy
Moonmaid, only visible during the western twilight or the eastern pre-dawn. The
Faith said the Moonmaid was sacred to the Maiden, the aspect of the Seven-Faced
God representing chastity and innocence. But Myranda Royce said the same
wanderer was sacred to the Lysene goddess.
A goddess of love but not of marriage, the older girl had laughed, those brown
eyes sparkling like a malevolent child’s, up to pure mischief. Do you feel it,
innocent one? The bright queen of the sky is strong tonight.Myranda voice
lowered to a hush, as ardent in her devotion as a young septa in the first hour
of her calling. My Lady wears a single white garment like the nameless poor,
she recited, her moist palm reaching out and taking hold of Alayne’s hand. The
pearls of a prostitute are placed around Her neck. She prowls the streets,
snatching men from taverns for sexual adventure. She can interchange the beast
with the man. The brutal and the strong are transformed into the gentle and the
tame.
Alayne had fingered Randa’s nameday gift of dangling pearls, her eyes fixed on
the Moonmaid. She was hiding low in the western sky behind scudding, wispy
clouds. Yet the wanderer had exerted a strange brutal pull that walked the hair
on the girl’s arms.
Each of the two feminine deities, so far apart in their aspects, claimed the
same wanderer. What were the girls there like, what were their true natures?
Alayne was unable to decide whether they should be good or should be bad or
should be either …
“Yes, the little bird is from the Moonmaid. Where all the girls are pretty and
kind. So sweet, even their arseholes taste like honey.”
Sansa laughed a little nervously. She felt giddy, like someone turned upside
down. His bizarre gallantries charmed her thoroughly. To think she had once
thought he was incapable of them. Men had praised her hair, her eyes, her face
but who but him would praise that place?
“Kiss me,” she said, blushing furiously. Her legs were unsteady in the water.
She wanted to run away, aghast that she even dared to ask for such a thing
“Lady Sansa’s embarrassed herself,” the Hound laughed. Sandor teased her with
distracting kisses around her mound and pelvic bone, while he held her thighs
in place. She smiled sheepishly, like a naughty child, then grunted softly when
his tongue finally lavished her with what she wanted to cry out for.
It was so verynice. A nice sensation. Kisses there and there. He was her dog
and performing a dog's service. “Ah—ah—ah—” her throat releasing its soft vocal
breaths, the sound rising in intensity as their tongues serviced her. “Slower,”
she breathed, struck by a flash of insight. “Lick me slowly.” Make me come
hard, dog.  She laughed again and the laugh actually brought the good feeling,
her voice straining to a crescendo of “Sandor—Sandor. O-o-o-o-ooooh.”
How joyful she felt, melting into a puddle of bliss, muscled arms carrying her
giggling, jelly-legged body back into the water’s embrace. She leaned back and
felt the hairy wall of the Hound’s chest. Sandor’s face was alongside hers and
she could hear his intake of breath. He dragged his nose against the softness
of her cheek.
What strange sensations, what puzzling duality. A gryphon, with his muscled
chest as furred as any beast of the forest behind her. A dragon with his black,
leathery skin to her front.
She was wooing bygone creatures from the songs, when heroes walked the earth
and magic was strong in the world.
Sansa held out her hands, wrists up. Had they always been free? A blur of
pleasure spread, the room melting into soft golden focus. “Your slave, my
lord,” she said gravely. 
Sandor suddenly flipped her over until she was on her back. Her legs swiftly
entwined around the Hound’s waist as he lifted her buttocks in the palms of his
hands, keeping her afloat.
She floated in silence, wisps of her hair drifting over her face and body like
the slow motion undulations of seaweed. She was enervated to the point where
she could not move, her spirit sinking into the warmth of the water— a hare who
had found a cozy nook in the earth, safe and at rest after a long chase.
I love you, the binding enchantment on the very tip of her tongue. She wanted
to say it. Just to hear how it would sound.
She mouthed the I but the golden luminosity penetrated through her blindfold
until it was behind her eyelids, filling her head, revealing its bright, angry,
sun-god self.
 
******
Sansa awakened with a cry, gulping air like a fish trying to break the surface
of water. Her body was damp, covered in a fine sweat. Voices broke in, full of
nervous worry, their murky dour faces floating above her. The cold metal links
of a chain brushed against her collarbone. The words sopping wet, drenched,
fluid entered her conscious mind.
“Little bird …” Sandor said fiercely. He held her pinned, with arms thick
across her breasts as if she might leave the moment he let go.
“Stay,” the Hound rasped.
“Oh!” she gave a loud gasp as a sudden rush of warm water was poured on her
head. Fingers began to work her wet, stringy hair. They’re bathing me, as if
they were my maids.
All this endless bathing, I must be very dirty, she thought, then giggled at
her unintended jest. She could hear the low pitch of Sandor and the Hound,
muttering words she couldn’t understand: secretive plots, quiet chuckling, the
dirty edge barely holding on. Other times, there was a hostility so subtle that
she wondered if she was merely imagining it.
Voices as dry as husks joined in song, rasping out loud lyrics. They soothed
her, allowing her to catch her breath, the thumping of her heartbeat slowing to
a warm thud of blood as her brain found a firm footing in consciousness.
One song ended and another one began. She sat curled on Sandor’s lap, both arms
tight around his neck. He kissed his way up her throat while the Hound croaked,
My featherbed is deep and soft,
and there I’ll lay you down,
I’ll dress you all in yellow silk,
and on your head a crown.
For you shall be my lady love,
and I shall be your lord.
I’ll always keep you warm and safe,
and guard you with my sword.
His singing was terrible, like the bawling of dogs, a rough quavering of notes
that could curdle milk. Shamelessly, he was la-la-la-ing the rest of the song.
A sudden compulsion took hold of her. Sansa began to sing along. The Hound’s
voice grew quieter, less imposing: he followed her words, picking up her key
until they sang in perfect unison, an octave apart. When the song was done, she
laughed in pleasure. Sandor covered her mouth with his hand—perhaps he did not
know her so well that he would think she was mocking him.
“That’s quite a trick you have,” the Hound said.
She bit Sandor’s hand. “What trick?” she said in breathy giggles.
“Dredging up joy. I wonder how you do it. Even from the Red Keep. From the
bottommost shithole in the Seven Kingdoms. Here,”—the Hound’s finger jabbed her
in the chest— “a hidden spring of happiness. Is the supply unending? I hope so,
I had dreamt of bathing in it until I drowned.”
“It’s been a bloody long time since a naked girl sang with me,” Sandor said.
“In truth, never,” the Hound snorted.
“Never is indeed a very long time,” Sansa agreed, nodding solemnly. She began
another song to lure him back to good cheer: Milady's Supper.
The Hound knew this song too but the tune was slightly different, down a fifth
from the note, where hers was singing up a third. Their two songs harmonized
and how it felt like magic.
Only now the words became dissonant—his song detailing a supper her lady mother
would have never approved of—dirty, so dirty, the thought intruded; the song’s
words spiking something inside of her. By the end of it, she was rubescent,
embarrassing herself by the possibilities to which her mind ran. She knelt in
the darkness, reaching out to find one of them, to kiss him in the manner he
craved. But she was clumsy and his erection ended up poking her in the eye,
instead of sliding down her throat. They all burst into laughter after that,
the water shaking with their fits. She tried to make up for it a few more times
but they eluded her—not a difficult task as she was blindfolded and bound, with
sound her only guide.
They sang Sansa Was a Merry Maid, a Merry Maid Was She, as she tottered in the
tub chasing after them. Their laughter became bubbly, needing no starter,
feeding on itself. It was against the logic of nature, yet here they were.
Silly children enjoying themselves when they shouldn't as they were such
opposites.
Suddenly, she was caught from behind, her upper arms held in a powerful grip by
two huge hands, directing her into place.
“A prize is always sweeter for having to work for it, Lady Sansa,” the Hound
said. His fingernail tapped against her teeth, telling her to open them. He
slipped his finger between her parted lips. She sucked at it with dirty
welcome. “Just like that, no teeth, up and down with a little more at the tip.
Like you're sucking on an icicle. You Northern girls have plenty of those,
don't you?”
That very morning she had been possessed by a dangerous tormenting spirit, some
creature stirring awake inside of her, demanding her duty. But Alayne was at a
loss on how to satisfy the creature's appetites. She had a heard a story about
Sansa Stark: the singers said that Winterfell's daughter was a witch, that she
had used magic to murder King Joffrey and then transformed herself into a wolf
with great big bat wings to fly out of her tower in the Red Keep.
Oh, how she wished that was true, that Sansa had magic. But it was no good and
the Gods—both Old and New—hadn't seen fit to give her any advantages, despite
her fervent prayers. She had no wolf to protect her, no experience of battles,
no talent for arms, no allies she could trust. The creature would not leave her
in peace—it tore at her guts, drove her outdoors to wander the wintry gardens
in an intolerable state between anger and terror. On a mad impulse, she had
broken off an icicle and sucked on it. She imagined the icicle was the
greatsword Ice, sucking at it greedily until it melted into nothing. All day
she had felt the coldness of it in her tummy, as if the icicle was lodged
there, as if Ice was lodged inside of her. How she wished that she could
undergo an alchemy, no longer soft copper but Valyrian steel.
Alayne had retired early. She brushed that brown hair without the need for
candle light, her face reflected in the mirror as pale as if she was freshly
powdered with twice-boulted flour. Color flashed only when she blinked and
there was a giant, a fear, lurking behind the window of her eyes. Instructing
her on what to say to the Vale lords about her aunt’s death, how frequently she
should lace Sweetrobin’s milk with sweetsleep.
The girl had tried banish the fear with a little bow of a smile and what should
have appeared sweet and vulnerable instead made her skin prickle. The smile
that emerged was hard-edged, full of elemental duplicity, the way the street
children she had seen in King’s Landing appeared canny. Rather than climbing
into her bed, the girl laid down on the floor, the cold stones cooling her hot
cheeks. She imagined prostrating herself, grinding dirt into her hair,
beseeching the Gods with shrieks and great weepings, becoming one of those mad
sparrows that wandered the Kingsroad bawling out the wickedness of the world.
Instead the girl cried without a sound, her vacant eyes flooding with tears as
if she grieved for something far off, far removed from herself and her present
situation. Tears for a lady in a song. Alayne cried until there was nothing
left in her, until her body was as hollow as a beetle shell, empty of anything
but the desire for the exhausted, black sleep of night.
The flopping plait of Sansa’s hair slapped against Sandor’s thigh. He brushed
it aside then put his hand on her head, stroking her either from affection or
to keep her from running away. She turned her face up and smiled at him shyly,
slyly, blushing and brazen at the same time.
“Put my cock in your mouth,” the Hound rasped.
She kissed Sandor’s thigh, nuzzling the hair. It was softer on the inside than
the rest. She laid a kiss at the weight of his testicles, her tongue
discovering that curious little seam that ran in the middle. Men were
delicious, the thought came to her again. Sandor Clegane was delicious.
A faint smile crept into her lips as her tongue ascended until she was sucking
delicately on the dome of the head. She was performing a whore's service but he
made her like it, thrilling in its own right. He was a strong man but he was
relinquishing his strength to her. If she could be a man, she would be him, so
brave and ferocious, one of the best fighters in the Seven Kingdoms.
“Pretty. You are so pretty.” Sandor lowered his gravelly voice into something
near a whisper, hardly more than a rasp underneath his breath: “My lady love.”
The gentleness in his voice acknowledged how delicately and substantially their
bodies were connected. Even as she could hear the rough excitement in the
Hound’s scraggy breathing.
He likes this—she thought, as she licked that groove on the underside of the
crown— the obeisance of a woman at his feet. Sansa licked it over and over,
until the tip exuded a salty drop. “Take it. Take it, little bird,” the Hound
growled, his hands around her throat. If only she could take it, take a portion
of his ferocity, of his strength, to possess his courage through their
communion.
With the salty, slippery taste of his seed on her tongue, she slipped her lips
around the head and descended inch by inch. Very slowly, the massive column
slid down her throat and she paused when she could go no further. 
The warm release of each exhalation from her nostrils stirred the thicket of
hair at his base. She sniffed deeply, like an animal—between her legs, the
inescapable spasm. She whimpered, squeezing her thighs together. The Hound
cupped her, the heel of his hand pressing against that button but she wriggled
away from his touch, not wanting to be distracted: Sandor’s grunts were the
reward. She drew out again to the edge of the throbbing crown, pausing there to
offer a more sucking kiss then back down, concentrating on every ridge and vein
along his length. The rhythmical plunge, steady and slow.
“Clever girl,” Sandor said hoarsely. “Go on! Go on!” the Hound breathed. Sandor
began to push his hips forward, making short thrusts inside her mouth. She
opened her mouth wider and stayed perfectly still. He took away the
responsibility and she shivered with delicious, shameful joy. “That’s
marvelous, little bird,” the Hound rasped, pinching her nipple between his
thumb and forefinger as he would a child’s cheek.
The thrusts went deeper, Sandor’s breathing coming fast, the trembling muscles
of his thighs stirring the water. She heard his deep low moan: “Mercy.” The
Hound tugged at her throat but she waited, her nose laying in the ditch of
Sandor’s groin, inhaling his sweat.
He grew huge as his pleasure mounted along his cock until he was filling her
mouth with his seed. She didn’t know what was the proper thing to do so she
swallowed it quickly—it was salty-bitter and metallic. She waited a few more
moments until his spasms subsided and then pulled away from him, her last
gentle sucking kiss making him flinch.
Sansa sank back into the Hound's embrace. He wiped at her lips with his thumb
then thrust his tongue inside her mouth. When he finally broke away, she smiled
shyly at him.It wasn’t so dirty, she thought. Not dirty, so much as messy,
earthy, unconcerned about neatness and fuss.
She heard Sandor sit down beside her. She leaned to her side so that her head
would rest on his shoulder. “Did you like it?” she asked, afraid that he found
her lacking both in skill and enthusiasm. She had a premonition that this
service was one he received frequently. It was easy and convenient for the
girl, avoiding his ugliest feature: his drunk and sullen eyes.
“First, you slobbered all over him like a puppy,” the Hound laughed. “Then …
well, he’s bloody chafed enough to fall asleep with his legs apart.”
Sansa looked downwards, feeling like a frisky dog who had just had received a
rap on the nose. “That’s unkind,” she sniffled, then wiped her nose with the
back of her hand as if she was some country girl who didn’t know better.
You look almost a woman … face, teats and you're taller too, almost  … She
suspected that she had been the focus of his lewd thoughts for a long time. She
remembered how he held his head in his hands in the tent and pictured him in
that same position as the years rolled by. The unexploded weight of his
fantasies suffocating his brain, if not other parts. He had built her up into
someone she wasn't, as seductive as the Black Pearl of Braavos, when in truth
she was shy and inexpert and life had taught her to be afraid of men. Men who
wanted to do more than admire her beauty, who wanted to feed off it to satiate
their own hungers.
“Bugger you, dog. You should be muzzled,” Sandor threw back. He turned her face
towards him and kissed her. “Don't think I would ever take any of it for
granted. I'm inexpert too.”
“Inexpert,” the Hound snorted. “No truer word. Ser Three-Pump-Lump.” The Hound
drew her to him, trying for a kiss. “They weren’t all lewd, girl. Some … some
were too sharp for the body to contain.” She felt the press of his lips on her
forehead, the burnt side twitching. “Never had a woman who wasn’t crying or
demanding gold up front.” He hesitantly laid his hand on her bare belly and
held it there before his fingers dipped to gently probe her still wet folds.
“There’s been none better than you. Believe that,” the Hound said, his voice
gruffer than usual.
“Have you been with a lot of women?” she asked, part maddening curiosity, part
pinching anxiety, horrible and rising. She thought of King Robert, bored unless
he was fighting or drinking or whoring. It was baffling that her father would
be so loyal to such a deeply flawed man. Love could be so inexplicable;
sometimes it demanded more than simple commitment.
“Too many,” said Sandor.
“Not nearlyenough,” answered the Hound.
The response was contradictory yet made complete sense to her. He was a
contradiction, the tension between his words, his bearing, his actions
bewildering her.
“I was twelve. The day after I killed my first man. I thought it would prime
me. Pup to Hound. But that first passage… an old man with shit-stained
breeches. He cursed me as he bled to death. Said I would be consumed by demons.
What a fucking jape, I was already a demon. Gregor made me into one when I was
seven in a fucking baptism of fire. It’s Sandor who's consuming me. I built him
a coffin in my brain, brick by brick but he’s still there, always breathing in
my soul. The second passage, she was—”
“Shut. Your. Fucking mouth. Dog,” Sandor snarled. He turned to her and huffed,
“Sack of King’s Landing. Bloody Hell.” There was something more in his voice,
an emotion Sansa couldn't identify, harshly restrained. Her wits deserted her,
she hardly knew what to do, what to say. “Bloody hell… what a year that was. I
grew up unbelievably fast. Gregor was knighted that year. The taste of my first
battle—I wanted to be attacked so I could fight, so I could kill. And my cock,
once it was a water spout then it became a pillar of fire …”
The Hound spat, “Cock and cunt, what the fuck is it anyway? Another cork in a
bottle. The winesinks were faster in curing my ailments.”
“And far cheaper,” Sandor snorted.
“There was this girl. I saw her in the window of a brothel behind Rhaenys's
Hill. She was born in King’s Landing but the blood of summer was in her skin. I
tell you, she had your eyes. Not the color. The look. So sweet and so grave.
Boiled sugar innocence, no spoil or taint. I saw you when I saw her. Saw you
lolling about in bed like a bride, those lovely eyes widening when I entered
you. Your lashes fluttering as I fucked you, thick as the wings of a bird from
the Summer Isles.”
“Stupid slut. She tried to charge me double. Sang the same bloody song I heard
in every whorehouse from Lannisport to King’s Landing. All my pretty poetry to
no avail. I would have been gentle.” The rising timbre of the Hound’s voice
frightened her as if he was fighting the infantile urge to cry, coupled with
the monstrous urge to murder. “Don’t you want to say something?” he barked.
Her agitation was spinning on itself. Being with him was like walking the
parapets, perpetually eighty feet off the ground while looking down endlessly,
fretting over the loss of purchase. She tried to focus on what to say to calm
him but was at the mercy of the most dithery, birdbrained aspects of her
nature.
“You compose poems?” The second she said it, she knew that his words would be
of the kind no woman wanted to hear.
“Yes,” he laughed, slapping his forehead. “Though those buggering singers lie
when they claim poetry makes the girls wet for you. Here's one I wrote for my
little bird: roses are red, violets are blue. We're going to fuck because I'm
stronger than you.”
Sansa laughed, though it took a moment to realize this was what she was doing.
It was a fitting poem to describe his behavior towards her. Cruelty and
chivalry, all jumbled up together. Her brain leapt to a single moment: that
odd, terrifying threat he made to the simple naïve mind of the young girl he
had caught alone on the serpentine steps.One day I’ll have a song from you,
whether you will it or no.
The night of the battle, his offer of protection, his hard kiss … and then the
press of the dagger against her throat. What would have happened if she hadn't
appealed to his drunken sentimentality? “Would you have raped me?” she asked
shakily.
“I wanted to, I wanted to … I was hard,” the Hound said intensely.
“Never. Never. I don't want to hurt you. Why the fuck are you asking me this?”
Sandor said explosively. He gripped her forearms. His clamp was full of
strength and as cold as ice. The agitation in his voice mounted, “How could you
even think that? I want only to protect her.”
“Don’t lie. I hate liars. Go bugger yourself. Gutless fraud. You didn't protect
her. There she was, living like that, hurting so bad and you did shit.”
He was no longer talking to her at all but to himself. “You didn't help. You
stood there in your white cloak and let them beat her. Bloody buggering coward.
Men call you the Hound, but you're the King of Hares. I don't see why you
should be allowed to live after that. Go on, cry, cry, rabbit. I'd like to skin
you alive and watch you cry into the next century.”
Sansa shivered in the warm water, struggling to make sense of it all. She felt
Sandor’s fingertips follow the edge of her blindfold and then he was lifting it
up. She tried to discern his expression but couldn’t see beyond the blur of
hateful potential tears.
“Leave me alone,” she growled. With the knuckle of his forefinger, he wiped her
eyes.
He had told her in the tavern that loving him would be a burden, that she would
feel the weight of it on her shoulders. She had a better understanding of his
meaning now. He was more than just angry and wine-sick. She saw through him,
saw the depths of his pain and his violence, saw a self-loathing that she
couldn't even begin to imagine. Why she should dream of him like this, a man
tormented, a man in shambles rather than some white-knight fantasy, confounded
her.
The Hound drew her backward into him, up against him. “I'm your dog, I'm your
dog,” he rasped, tightening himself around her, iron fingers on her waist as he
bent low and kissed the top of her head. The ache in his voice made her throat
close. Oh, he was in such desperate need. He needed a mother and he needed a
whore. But what were her needs? She was more than either of these roles. She
was not a sweet piece of honey for his consumption, all heart, no brain.
Born to serve.
 
***** Skinchanger *****
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me-
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
Sappho, Fragment 130
 
She felt Sandor’s mouth just under her ear where the skin was soft and tender.
They had her trapped between them, the Hound’s lips on her shoulders, Sandor’s
on her neck. She tensed for a moment, anticipating the feel of the sharpness of
his teeth. He had a peculiar delight for abusing that area of flesh. He had
once held a longsword against it, not hard enough to break the skin but with
just enough pressure so she could feel the sharpness of the steel. And during
the act, he had used his teeth to score the skin around her neck and around her
shoulders. Yet he made no gesture that he wanted to frighten or dominate
her—nothing but the soft press of his burned lips, a quiet possession. 
Sansa scowled, renewing her resistance, twisting her body, her nails digging
into Sandor’s chest. He needed to be taught a lesson, a lesson on
inviolability. Guilt gave her a moment’s fight but she brushed it aside. She
ought to demonstrate how wrong it was to trespass into places, uninvited.
What the fuck are you doing? he roared inwardly when he felt her slip inside
his skin. She could feel his pure, blind panic. Tasted the fear at the back of
his mouth.
At the edges of her mind, she felt the opportunity and she reached for it. The
Hound thought he was so dangerous. This was her dream. The natural shift of
power moved to her. It’s not as if he was fragile ... I wouldn’t do it if he
was. He could take it. He had said he was her dog, so she had slipped him a
collar.
Whatever it was, she knew it was something akin to sex, the whole experience so
foreign and bizarre. She was inside of him, seeing through the Hound’s eyes,
wearing his skin like it was a cloak.
She saw herself, perfectly still, blindfolded and bound. She lifted her body
up, cradling it in the Hound’s arms. Peeking through the windows of his eyes,
the girl’s vulnerability appeared enormous. She touched the girl, stroking her
like a little dove, until the girl’s cunt began to open, aching to be filled.
She had never known what the flesh felt like on the inside. Alayne safeguarded
that veil of skin fiercely—her life depended on its preservation. It was as
good as an iron bar on her bedchamber door. The surety that she was not Lady
Lannister.
An inquisitive finger, large and and calloused, slipped inside. One finger
became two, sliding in and out as the movement became frictionless. The strange
walls inside were so very soft but corrugated. Rather like the roof of my
mouth, she thought wryly. One hand remained inside the cunt while the other
moved to cradle the girl’s face.
Slender. Delicate.
Stupid. Weak.
The life of a small bird, its fragile pulse beating against the Hound’s
hand.Pretty little talking girl, you’re as empty-headed as a bird for true.
If the girl should die in a dream …
Someone was whimpering loudly like a dog who had been viciously kicked.
Enough, Sansa. She loosened the Hound’s grip, setting the girl aside.
She turned to look at Sandor. His eyes were half-dilated but retained an odd
expression. He had the look of an orphaned animal, a slinking stray, left to
scrounge for itself in the wilderness with no one to care for it.
A surge of protectiveness came but the feeling was mingled with a ferocious
sense of possession and power. She blinked hard as if blinking away mental
tears and suddenly found that she was seeing through those same grey eyes.
Eyelids that fluttered rapidly. Back and forth, back and forth, she slipped
into him as easily as slipping into an old leather shoe.
Sansa lay Sandor’s flat palm against the Hound’s jaw and she knew that he
couldn’t have moved even if he’d tried. She toured the Hound’s body with
Sandor’s fingers, avoiding the horrifyingly raw looking burned skin of his left
arm. The man was muscular to the point of being massive but lean with no fat;
his bulk was sinewy, spare and hard. Her fingers ran along his back, with the
spine deeply indented between thick layers of muscle. With the balls of the
Sandor’s knuckles, she caressed the Hound’s spine. He was so strong, as if each
sturdy disk was encased in Valyrian steel. She pinched his nipple before her
fingers followed a path all the way down, through the spur of black hairs that
ran from the neat navel to a grove of hair where his member lay inert.
Fingers drifted … swerved, retreated then advanced as they approached his cock,
as nervous as a poacher. Carefully, she touched the hair and then the warm
flesh. At first it was wrinkly, relaxed, then with a sudden jerk it began to
expand by great leaps, rushing to its full size. It was certainly nicer looking
than Tyrion's, perhaps even nicer looking than the common variety. It was
healthy and vital and she could admit there was a certain grandeur to its size.
She bunched Sandor’s fingers around the crown and squeezed it, stroking the
length from top to bottom. The skin there was so soft and thin, moving up and
down with the strokes. She forced Sandor to lick his palms and then she forced
him to stroke the Hound faster. The spit-slicked palms increased his agitation.
She felt the blood pumping through his body, his legs widening their stance.
She tightened her grip.
Am I too rough?
I wouldn’t want to break it.
Excitement possessed her, sharp as black polished dragonglass, driving off all
reason. She had never in her life wanted to hurt any creature but she looked at
him and felt her blood run in a tangle.
She pinched the foreskin between her fingers then drew it down and scored the
tender crown with nails. It hurt, hurt and burned and she did not stop. His
body, her mind, jerked in a bright pain that drew every nerve as taut as a
bowstring. The Hound made a brutal sound but he thrust into Sandor’s palm,
muscles arching towards the pain.
Hurt me if it pleases you, little bird. His eyes looked off in the distance at
the girl, as delicate and vulnerable in her passivity as a porcelain doll with
a hairline crack. The emotion rippled through him, through her. He wanted to
fling the girl onto the floor and ram himself in. He wanted to crawl to her and
kiss her toes as if he was the lowest of curs.
Nails scored fire across his testicles. She felt the pain humming through his
veins. Behind it was some fierce emotion she couldn’t unsnarl—his desire to
fight and overpower, inexplicably twisting and twining in his mind with the way
he wanted to submit to her rule.I’m your dog, I’m Sansa’s dog.
It was a strange and sweet confusion, hardly bearable. Sansa reached even
farther, not waiting for his permission. Instead of gaining greater control of
his body, she found herself further sinking inside his head.
Oh, he's real, as real as I am.
The belated realization struck her like a hard slap. There was too much here
for him to merely be a part of her own imagination. He was a pathless
wilderness, the horizon of his mind stretching out for thousands of leagues.
She wanted to burst into foolish tears. How terrifyingly sweet was her
discovery. He would be the answer to a thousand prayers. Help me, send me a
friend, a true knight, she had prayed to whatever gods should deign to listen.
He wanted to protect her: a devotion that was almost physical, a tangible wound
in his mind. It would be so easy to bind him to her service, to transform him
into the sword that she would wield. She relished the united power she had over
him—herself and his own hidden dreams to protect her, a combined force greater
than one mere girl of four and ten.
It was her last distinct thought. What's happening to me? Where am I going? she
cried.
She felt as if she was falling, tumbling unbelievably fast down a long drop to
nowhere. Memories and inchoate thoughts overwhelmed her and she wanted to shout
and cry and babble fears. She heard herself and another voice, deep and raspy,
make sounds of distress as she spun down the murky and terrifying well.
Suddenly, her fall ended and she was painfully jerked upright like a wooden toy
knight pulled by strings.
Her mind couldn't comprehend the change. Her head hurt; she was wine-sick, she
was always wine-sick, she had a chronic need for oblivion that only wine
remedied. She despised herself, she had lost everything, she struggled to put
the disintegrating pieces of her person together but failed every time, wailing
at her endless defeats. She wanted to cry and she wanted to kill. She wanted
someone to attack her, so she could fight them. She would feel better if she
could hurt someone. Maybe they would kill her. That would be better … that
would be good. Murder me, take my life, be done with it.
The Red Priest intoned the catechism, the night is dark and full of terrors.
That bloody truth was all around her, plain to behold: the knight is dark and
full of terrors.
Knights were dark, knights were for killing. Were they children or half-wits
that she must school them? A knight's a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows
and the sacred oils and the lady's favors, they're silk ribbons tied round the
sword. Maybe the sword's prettier with ribbons hanging off it but it will kill
you just as dead. Well, bugger your ribbons and shove your swords up your
arses. I'm the same as you. The only difference is, I don't lie about what I
am. So kill me but don't call me a murderer while you stand there telling each
other that your shit don't stink. You hear me?
Why she gave a rat's arse of their opinion, why she bothered to defend herself
at such length she could not fathom. Knights were sworn to defend the weak,
protect women and fight for the right but none of them did a fucking thing.
That it should needle her so, that she should care … stupid, so fucking stupid.
That was the sordid truth: she had cared, did care. If she hated herself for
any one single fatal flaw in her character, it was that.
She sucked in her breath as Dondarrion removed his breastplate. His ribs were
starkly outlined beneath his pale skin; an ugly puckered crater scarred his
breast and when he turned, she saw that he wore a matching scar upon his back.
The lance should have killed him. Blood magic, her eyes whitened, widened:
there was no other explanation.
She should have been scared. There was nothing as disturbing as the Lightning
Lord, a creature who looked human but was not human at all. Instead, she felt
only that familiar ghostly calm settling inside of her. No fear, no disgust, no
reason, only the cold flame of destruction; a burning darkness that filled her
with excitement. Killing was the sweetest thing there is. Her mouth curved,
almost a smile.
The knight is dark and full of terrors. The cave was dark too but she was the
terror there.
Her smile died when Dondarrion set fire to his sword, using his own blood to
ignite it. Burn in seven hells, she cursed. Dondarrion became every knight she
had ever known, butchers like Boros Blount and Meryn Trant, hapless fools like
Dontos Hollard, cowards like the Redwyne twins who couldn't even look at her
and, looming above them all, the malevolent shadow of Gregor, gigantic in
proportion.
She hammered at her opponent while the twisted jape of the knighting ceremony
pounded in her brain.
In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave,
Hard and fast her cuts came—
In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just,
— from low and high
In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the young and innocent.
—from right and left
In the name of the Maid, I charge you to protect all women.
—and each one the knight blocked.
The flames swirled around the knight's sword and he fanned them, made them burn
brighter, so it seemed as if he stood within in a cage of fire. She edged back,
frightened and furious. Bugger him, only cowards fought with fire. The sight of
the flames momentarily paralyzed her. The fear of fire and the fear of Gregor
were intertwined, the darkest terror that lived in the deepest layer of her
being. Two decades later and a mountain of muscle could not dislodge them.
The knight attacked, filling the air with ropes of fire, driving her back on
her heels like a chastened mongrel. She caught one blow high on her shield and
a painted dog lost its head. She parried another cut, grunting and cursing and
reeling away but the knight would her give no respite.Bloody bastard, she
screamed as the knight forced her closer to the firepit, the flames licking the
back of her thighs.
She fought on, recklessly counterattacking. She charged, swinging her sword
harder and harder, trying to smash the knight down with brute force. Her shield
caught fire and the panic clutched her. She hacked off her shield but it only
fanned the flames even more. The fire caught and her left arm was ablaze. She
smelled burning flesh; the ghastly sweet scent filled her brain and nostrils
with black fear.
Finish him, she heard. Other voices picked up the chant.
For some reason that made perfect sense, Arya was there too, a judge without
mercy. Guilty, guilty, kill her, guilty. 
Her anger moved like a living thing inside of her. The creature inside of her
refused to let her die, kept her panic from blossoming into terror. The Hound
gave a rasping scream and she raised her sword in both hands. Brought it
crashing down with all her strength. The knight blocked the cut easily but his
burning sword snapped in two. Her cold steel plowed into his flesh and clove
him clean down to the breastbone. Blood rushed out in a hot black gush.
She jerked backwards, her arm still burning. Pain on top of pain, layers of it,
so excruciating that she couldn't think or breathe or see. Someone whimpered,
the sound of a child crying as Gregor loomed over it, his mouth filled with
darkness and black blood.
Please. Help me. Someone. Help me.
Please, she rasped. The one word was an ache in the cave. An echo of torment,
of petition, its roots reaching far back in time. A boy knelt in the sept of a
modest keep, reciting devotions to the Mother with only anger and desolation in
his heart, knowing from the start that none of his pleas would be heard. A girl
whispering prayers to the rustling leaves in the forlorn godswood of the Eyrie,
the sound of her voice like a drum in her mind: please and please and please …
She was crying hard now, crying like a baby. The sobs didn't help, they didn't
relieve the tension, they only made it worse. The sobs tore at her throat,
bruising her, making her voice raspy as if thorns were lodged there. That was
fitting, that was her life. All briars. No roses.
Through the blur of her tears, she saw two eyes stare back at her. They were
the yellow eyes of death. It was Nymeria, it was Arya. You want me dead that
bad? Then do it, wolf girl. 
She was dead already, living and dying blending into each other. Why she fought
so hard to live was beyond her.
You killed Mycah, Arya said, daring her to deny it. Tell them. You did. You
did.
Arya’s words, sharp as any knife, ruthlessly wounding her with the truth. I
did. Her whole face twisted.
You go to hell, Arya's curse echoed in her brain.
Hurt gripped her, tearing and twisting her. Her world splintered and for the
barest second, she lingered on the knife's edge between two realms. The veil
between the dream world and the waking world was parted and all was revealed.
“Oh, you'll break my heart,” she sobbed.
She tried to hold on the knowledge but it slipped through her fingers like
rain. Don’t you know that dreams are written on memory’s walls with water,
innocent one?
She plunged back down, her misery burning like an inferno, until she collapsed
into one white-hot point of agony. The hurt held for an interminable period.
Someone was humming off-key, a quiet hymn that was unmistakable. She was being
swayed softly, a forehead pressed against hers. Her chin was gently lifted, the
last hushed hum of the song dying away as a kiss, soft and frail and tentative,
was laid against her lips. She slumbered, suspended from consciousness for an
indefinite amount of time. It seemed like a hundred years.
When she awoke, it was all at once. She sat up abruptly, all her nerves
atingle.
Where am I?
It was the richest chamber she had ever seen. The ceilings were not blackened
by decades of smoke but adorned with bright frescoes and carvings that were fit
for a queen.
At first, they seemed like pastoral scenes of gentle parties of ladies. A
second glance revealed that the strange small animals lolling at the ladies’
feet were not lapdogs but magical creatures. Direwolves, she recognized, and
unicorns and dragons and things she could not name that resembled nothing so
much as spiders made out of snowflakes.
The tall bed frame in which she lay was weirwood, swathed in bed hangings of
grey velvet embroidered with the sigil of House Stark. Scrolls and books lay
piled on a velvet-draped table. Sansa could read the title on the spine of one,
covered in beautiful blue calf-hide:A History of the War of the Five Kings.  
Out of the corner of her eye, she spied a pillow that had once sat on her
father's chair in his solar. It was shabby and almost worn through, with an
imperfect embroidery of a direwolf. It was one of her very earliest efforts and
though she produced pillows with more ornate, elegant needlework in later
years, this first one remained dearly cherished by him. Her vision blurred as
all of the pieces suddenly came together.
“I am stronger in the walls of Winterfell,” she said aloud, choking back tears.
The chamber’s architecture was the same as her mother’s bedchamber in
Winterfell, though this room seemed not as vast and the ceiling beams were not
so high. I was so much smaller then, she thought, holding the embroidered
coverlet close about her shoulders. She sniffed at it and it carried to her the
scent of strawberry leaves and rose petals. The front was unadorned grey damask
silk but the interior design—unseen unless one was beneath it—was not so plain.
The interior silk was exquisitely embroidered with an emblem of a black dog and
a small bird in silver and indigo thread. She ran her fingers across the neat
stitches and knew with absolute certainty that this was her own handiwork.
“Sandor?” she called out. She felt strangely exposed, her surroundings now
discomforting her.
She climbed from her bed and walked around the chamber. Her toes sunk into soft
eastern rugs. Pentoshi, she suspected. She warmed her frigid fingers against
the familiar silken tapestries that hung near her wardrobe. The tapestries were
of the Kings of Winter and the Lords of Winterfell that once decorated her
parent's chambers.
Overwhelmed, she pressed her cheek against their coolness. “Sandor?” she cried
again, her voice sounding uncharacteristically infantile and petulant, as if
her peace had been pulled away from her as one pulls away a blanket from a
sleeping child. She wished she could have him here with her. She longed to lie
beside him, to be held by him, to touch him whenever she wanted.
Sansa walked around the room again. The room was darkening but there were no
candlesticks or torches. Instead, she illuminated the chamber by lighting
marvelous enameled oil lamps that burned without smoke. The last lamp to be lit
was near her mirror …
She was dressed in a thin white bedgown, a string of pearls around her neck,
her auburn hair loose. She touched her lips—they were shell-pink and soft, a
little reddened and swollen as if from violent kisses. Other than that, she
could not easily pinpoint what was different about herself.
The longer Sansa stared at her own reflection, the more oddly threatened she
felt. Herface. Foreign. Perplexingly enigmatic. She looked upon it as she would
an exquisite work of art. There was mystery in it of the kind she had seen in
the goddesses carved above the altarpieces of Valyrian relics. She recalled one
that had awed her with the immensity of its cunning: The Goddess of Carnal
Desire. The Lady who dwelt in rivers and freshwater springs and whose kiss was
the doom of men.
At the pit of her tummy, there was a blossoming tension. There was nothing as
disturbing than the sight of someone who looked human but was not human at all.
“Who are you?” she whispered to her other self.
She kept her face perfectly still.
Her mirrored reflection smiled back at her.
It was a smile straight from the canvases of old Valyrian paintings.
Innocent one, the embrace of a god is never fruitless, a voice not her own
answered in return.
 
***** Flint and Steel *****
sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite
Sappho, Fragment 102
 
Sansa squeezed her eyes shut tight. She knew instinctively that she could no
more stare long at the Lady than she could stare long at the sun. To do so
would mean more than temporary blindness: she would have completely forgotten
that she had ever possessed, or even known, what sight was. In the darkness, a
calming magic worked itself upon her as two acts occurred in tandem. Her human
brain wiped away what it could never comprehend, while at the same time she
felt a man’s hand around her arms. Her knees bent and his arms hooked behind
them, scooping her up.
Sansa’s eyes flung open the moment her back felt the softness of her
featherbed. Sandor laid beside her, his face stony. She leaned towards him,
kissing his lips. He did not reject her embraces but neither did he return
them. His coolness made her stomach jump nervously.
She turned away from him and curled into a ball, putting her forehead in her
hands. She had often slept in this manner since the death of her mother. It was
oddly comforting, reminding her of what it must have been like cradled in the
womb.
A man’s hand moved down, a gentle pass from her shoulders to her arms, to the
slope of her hips and thighs, then back up again. “That feels nice. Thank you,”
she said softly.
It was soothing but she sighed from relief more than anything else. Sandor
further pressed his bulk up against her, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. He was a
foot taller yet his body fit perfectly with hers, as if they had been cut from
wax and meant to mold together in this manner.
A long silence spread itself over them. He asked for nothing, seemingly content
to lie in the simple stillness of her bedchamber in Winterfell, that inviolably
private place inside of her imagination.
Eventually, his massaging hands stilled and he turned around. She followed
after him, nestling close, pressing her lips to find that place on his body
that he so loved on hers. The area between her shoulder blades that he would
score with his teeth. She giggled as she bit him playfully. His square, strong
face remained grave in the lamplight.
She lifted her head and followed his line of sight.
He must have seen this before, she realized. Perhaps he had even owned it. She
knew the tapestry he was entranced by intimately. It hung in Alayne's
bedchamber.
The tapestry depicted the tale of the legendary member of the Kingsguard, Ser
Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. He was well-loved by the smallfolk and this
tapestry of his heroic deeds was widely fabricated by the weavers of Oldtown.
She had seen it often in the modest keeps of minor houses, upjumped nobles who
had no illustrious ancestors to valorize in warp and woof.
The tales of Ser Serwyn had sweetly thrilled Sansa, even as her mind would
often turn over and over the contradictions of his origins. He had rescued
Princess Daeryssa from giants. He had slayed the terrible dragon Urrax. He had
killed many men but he never relished killing, ending his days haunted by the
ghosts of all the knights he had honorably slain. That such a man had walked
the earth—how she desperately wanted to believe that he had been real.
The tapestries would always depict him as blonde, lithe; a handsome man with
even features that bore a faint resemblance to Loras Tyrell. That was all
wrong. Ser Serwyn could have never looked like that nor could he have been a
knight. He was of the time of the Age of Heroes, a period that began in the
mists of the past, as old as the lakes and mountains. It was long before the
Kingsguard, long before the Andals came to Westeros bringing with them their
Gods and their mounted men in steel armament.
The real Ser Serwyn would have been dark haired, the blood of the First Men
carved on his honest face. Alayne had half entertained the notion of sending a
raven to the guildhalls in Oldtown to tell them of all the ways in which they
were mistaken.
Alayne loved to look at the tapestry while alone in her bath … and sometimes
her thoughts would turn in a less than scholarly direction. Ser Serwyn was one
of them. The old old stories, the kind of lore Sansa drank as a child from Old
Nan’s lips. The unknown man who waited on his black horse on a darkened hill,
his hand outstretched. I could keep you safe, no one would hurt you again. In
the stories, if a girl believed him, if she went to him, she would not have
returned. Yet how that girl wanted to go … How she wanted …
The button of flesh would strain from its hood, her folds growing thickly
together. The sweet tension would curl in her tummy until it was hardly
bearable. Hands drifted before sliding between her legs. They caressed the
princess' body … the girl's legs were so shy but they always opened wide for
him.
Yet the good feeling never came to her in these daydreams. Her nerves would
flutter then go out, Ser Serwyn's gentle stroke-stroke not quite the right key
to open the hidden locks inside of her. She would emerge from her bath light-
headed, her teeth-chattering from the now cold water, pressing her face into
her towel to stifle the loneliness that welled up inside of her.
“You should have come with me when I gave you the chance,” the Hound's voice
rumbled from a distance, pulling her to sharp attention, like a dog pulled on a
chain. “Bugger that, I should have taken you, kept you for myself.”
She propped herself up on her elbows and saw him sitting on the chair with her
father’s worn pillow pressed against his back. He was dressed as Sandor was,
ready for bed, wearing nothing but a thin pair of linen breeches, his clean
bare feet peeking out from the hems. Are you angry at me? she thought.
“Are you angry at me?” she asked fretfully. He had every right to be angry with
her; she had reached too far, she had trespassed against him. For those
moments, they had bridged the gulf between two separate beings, personally
attached in thought and sympathy. She had lived his life as his memories had
run through his head.
The Hound bared his teeth. “I've told you already …  Fuck!” he cursed
viciously. “I wanted to keep you safe. I protected Arya, didn’t I? Who did you
think I did that for, stupid bitch? How could you even think that I would want
to hurt you?”
“I … I didn't think it. I only wanted to know if you're angry at me. You can be
angry at someone without wanting to hurt and kill them. They're not the same
thing,” she stammered. Then her voice took on a firmer edge. “Don’t call me
ugly names like that.”
She looked into his blood-darkened face. Whether it was harder to wear masks in
dreams or whether the dreamers had no desire to summon them, she did not know.
He did want to hurt her, in the same manner that he had hurt himself. He wanted
to compress himself inside of her, squeezing into her flesh, feeding her all of
his anger until she was as hateful as he was. He would broaden her education by
bashing her head in with all of his scorn so that she no longer saw any beauty
in the world, so that every noble sentiment was distrusted and debased. Heroes
and villains, good and evil, interchangeable with no inequalities between them:
the Brotherhood without Banners and the Brave Companions, Starks and
Lannisters, sheep and their butchers. He said he saw the world as it was, an
awful place, where the strong ruled the weak, where failure was the end of life
and all effort was dust.
What were the rewards of his wisdom? Sandor Clegane was the most miserable
person she had ever met. She had lived his life as flashes of frenzied futile
struggles in which anger and conflict and the will to fight were all that meant
anything; the only solace to be found at the bottom of a wine jug. She had been
him, as pathetic as the village drunk, in a stupor beside the trunk of a willow
tree where his captors' dogs had sniffed him out. And she had been him again, a
wounded animal in agony beside the trunk of a different willow tree where Arya
abandoned him to die. He had said he would keep her safe but had taken few
protective measures to save himself, all of his roads leading to the bleak
parapet of death.
Sandor pulled at her shoulder, causing her to fall back onto the bed. He
twisted himself so that he loomed large above her, shaking his head vigorously.
“It wouldn’t have gone down that way, I tell you. I would have kept myself safe
if I had you to keep safe. You would have been glad to have a dog.” He squeezed
her hand hard, the extra pressure meant to make an impression on her.
Not if he forced me to bed, she thought.
The Hound began to laugh. It had a crazy, frantic sound,  half-chuckle, half-
sob. It was a queer, unsettling noise. The room picked up the sound and echoed
with his smothered mirth. “The little bird would have been glad to have a dog,”
he repeated again and again. As if he was trying to convince himself as much as
her.
Sandor hung over her, his eyes brimming with the absence of unkindness, even as
the Hound's eyes had been full of cruelty. One was the master and one was the
servant but both were from the same source, indivisible, and to love one meant
to live close to the other.
She sighed wearily as she slid her palms over his chest. He bent to kiss her.
He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks, open wet kisses retreating to shy pecks
and little nibbles before surging again to the long and deep union of mouths.
They kissed many kisses, his long-simmering sexual fantasies so clearly
revealing themselves to her. Sandor wanted to linger in kisses, shy and joyful
kisses that no one had ever bestowed on him, as their bodies burned together
with an anticipation that they would refuse to outrun. 
As they kissed, she kept her eyes open, sometimes concentrating on Sandor,
sometimes peeping surreptitiously at the Hound. She could hear the sound of the
roughness of the fabric of his breeches as it brushed against the motion of his
stroking hands. He was touching himself while watching her kiss Sandor, with no
more shame than a dog has when it licks its own genitals.
She could not look away. His harsh sun-browned face. That body muscled like a
bull—his belly segmented by tendons inscribed so distinctly that he could have
served as an anatomy model for one of Maester Colemon’s lessons. How she wanted
to lick him all over, her mind picturing the path her tongue would trace along
those ridges and grooves. The curved lines that ran along his sides—linea
semilunaris— the three lines that that ran across the abdomen—linea
transversae—the line that ran down the middle, dividing the grooves into six
regions—linea alba—and all along the hundreds of silvery scars that ran through
his body like thin streams of water.
She turned away when the Hound caught her peeping at him. Sandor laughed
against her mouth and she blushed. She stroked his tongue with hers before
again daring to take a sidelong glance at the Hound. His mouth had settled into
a predatory smile so wicked that her throat shrank.
It was a smile that cornered, that hissed come here, come eat and be eaten. The
Hound placed both of his hands on himself. Twisting his wrists, pumping, but
the foreskin was lightly stuck in one spot. The sight of it made her shake from
the strain it took to keep still. She wanted was to go to him, to free the
stuck spot with her lips. “Ah—ah,” she moaned—desperately hungry—like a baby
who had been crying for hours for milk.
Sandor pushed her back onto the bed. His weight on her, crushing her sweetly,
as he curled his fists in the fabric of her bedgown. She opened her legs,
cradling him against her body, her hands reaching around and feeling the warm
skin of his back then dipping into the rumpled cloth of his breeches to caress
his buttocks.
He held her face in the palms of his hands.
She didn't flinch or look away from him, her dark deeply open eyes taking him
in. His hair had fallen over his forehead. His face was somber. But his eyes
were lit:I love you.   
Then his begging dog eyes asked a question, one that he didn't have the courage
to voice.
Her legs began to firm, her breath no longer a catch in her throat. Her
heartbeat slowed until it seemed to her she became blessed with detached
reason. As if she were two people, two hearts, one who burned and one who was
ice.
One heart was lodged in the body of a girl who was caressing her lover's cheek,
her hungry face insane with happiness. The other heart was lodged in the body
of a woman, who peered at this tableau as if from a great height, in melancholy
resignation.
She would not be deceived about him. As sure as there were troubles and plagues
in the world, Sandor Clegane was no true knight. He was the smudged reflection
of a masculine ideal that was powerful and ennobling.
He was far from perfect but her body thought his body was perfect. Their bodies
were like two dolls, female and male, that the gods would bang together at the
hips, as if trying to strike a spark off flint and steel.
 
 
 
 
 
***** Maiden Mother Crone *****
And in it cold water makes a clear sound through
apple branches and with roses the whole place
is shadowed and down from the radiant-shaking leaves
sleep comes dropping.
 
And in it a horse meadow has come into bloom
with spring flowers and breezes
like honey are blowing
 
In this place you Kypris taking up
in gold cups delicately
Nectar mingled with festivities:
pour
Sappho, Fragment 2
 
Sandor's body grew distant and tense against hers. Finally, he took a deep
breath and rolled away. He turned his back to her, curling slightly into a
ball, his face pressed into one open palm.
She moved closer, sliding her arm around him. He grunted but did not turn to
look at her, his eyes choosing to remain fixed on the tapestry.
From the chair came a loud snort. She turned over to face the Hound. “Not in
the mood for my sentimental bleating? Well, I'll spare you. Never mind about
all that …” he rasped. “Not worth a dog's damn. Not good enough. Not good
enough for you.”
“Sandor,” she said softly. Nothing else. She would have said the words if she
had them but her body could not escape the leash of her mind.
His jaw tightened and he cut his gaze away. Steely. It lasted for less than a
minute before he laughed to himself and looked up at her. There was a twitch at
the corner of his mouth and then he puckered his lips up for a kiss. An odd,
shuddery finger of emotion touched her heart.
When she was a little girl, she and Jeyne Poole had found a toad one day in the
lichyard in Winterfell. Jeyne picked up the thing, cradling it in the open
palms of her hands. Kiss him, Jeyne commanded, he's secretly a handsome prince.
Only a princess' kiss can break the spell. As Jeyne brought the toad slowly to
Sansa's lips, it seemed as if the creature itself yearned to be kissed, mouth
widening as if as it was trying to smile, body shaking as if in eager
anticipation. The toad was even more hideous up close, its skin as rough and as
dry as leather, the color of the lichen that covered gravestones. Disgusted,
she had slapped the toad away from Jeyne's hands. It landed with a splat on the
ground and lay there unmoving, twisted like one of her broken dolls.
Afterwards, she had felt terribly guilty. The memory would gnaw at her belly,
filling her with a dreaded fear of cosmic retribution. For the little girl had
only a dim sense of the complexities of life, raised with the assurance of its
personal goodness to her as long as she was benevolent,
merciful, impossibly kind.
“You've got a vicious streak, Sansa. A part of the filthy human race, are you?
To think I claimed that you were from the Moonmaid.” She turned away from the
Hound to find Sandor glaring at her, the wide-eyed, tight-mouthed look of a
reprimanding elder.
It was just the kind of look her mother was a master of—designed to make Sansa
feel ashamed. It pained her to think of all the times she had been mean to
Arya, cold to Jon. How she had tattled to Queen Cersei …
That memory cut like a blade and her brain performed a strange sort of mental
flinch—only it ran towards the bad thing and not away from it.
His face softened. “You weren’t responsible for his death, girl. He would have
died regardless of whether you ran your mouth off to Cersei or no. Bloody
lackwit should have taken Joffrey hostage before threatening her.”
“What am I responsible for? My cage.” she answered, in a voice thick with shame
and self-loathing. She and Arya would have left King’s Landing by ship if it
hadn’t been for her betrayal. And from there a multitude of what-ifs spawned,
some not so terrible, some so dreadful she could not bear to dwell on them for
long. The gods were cruel to Eddard Stark’s children. It seemed to her that she
had been fated to be a hare, forever seeking sheltered places but finding only
slaughterhouses.
Dark, anxious thoughts of Alayne's father came to her mind, unbidden and
unwanted. How tangled and knotty he was, as if he were two people. Lord Petyr,
her protector, warm and funny and gentle. And Littlefinger, with his sly smile
and minty kisses and endless games in which she was moved around like a cyvasse
piece to his advantage.
How much easier it had been to be virtuous when was she was little, when being
good was a matter of not being bad. A woman flowered, a grown-up, could not get
away with such docile passivity. She had to judge, she had to know the
difference between good and evil, not mistake it for the difference between
nice and nasty.
The call to action, a wolf baying for slaughter, raged inside of her like a
madness in her mind. It was a wonder her reason held. “I wish this dream would
go on forever. I wish I never had to live in the world again,” she said
explosively, her heart pounding until her ears were full of the sound. Even to
her own ears, her breath sounded angry and agitated, like the noise animals
make when they smelled fire.
She wanted to escape the burden of her own brain. She wanted to fuck, though
she could never make her tongue say that dirty word, the most impossible sound
in the universe. She wanted to take his member down her throat while his other
member filled her vagina, his hands stroking her body all over. She wanted to
be consumed by him, his fingers, his tongues, his cocks.
Sandor cupped her cheek, gentling her unsteady breath. He leaned his forehead
against hers, his face rocking against her skin like a child entreating. “I'm
sorry for being one of your tormentors. For every cruel thing I said, every
shit thing I did to you.”
She took his right hand and held it over her womb, her whole body stilling,
waiting. “This is the dream that lasts a thousand years. Let's spend every
second of it learning how to please each other.” His right hand reached up to
caress a breast, while his left hand slid down to cup her buttocks and pull her
closer. Sansa kissed his neck, feeling the beat of his pulse, licking the
masculine lump at his throat.
She could hear the Hound getting up from his chair, the groan of the featherbed
as he sat down on the edge of it. He kissed the back of her shoulder. “Little
bird. You slay me. I love you too well,” he said, his voice unduly solemn. 
She turned around to face him. He helped her undress and then he bent his head
to take a nipple in his mouth. So did Sandor. They both suckled gently. She put
her palms on the back of each black-haired head, intoxicated by the pleasure.
They flipped her onto her tummy. Sandor left the bed, standing beside it. The
lovely thickness of his penis bobbed in front of her face, demanding her
attention. Delaying the moment, she closed her eyes and kissed his hip bones,
running her fingers down the back of his knees, nuzzling his thigh around the
area where he had been wounded.
“Open your eyes, Sansa,” he said in a low voice.
When she complied, she saw that once where there was one, two now stood. The
amazing sight made the heat creep up her face to paint her cheeks. The Hound
and Sandor, like the stone statues that occupied the crypts, her Kings of
Winter. She looked at them. Naked, six feet and eight inches, her eyes
following the line of his legs: up, up, up. Oh, every inch a warrior.
Sansa leaned up to kiss Sandor but the Hound brusquely turned her chin towards
him. His erection brushed against her hair and then he held it, so delicate yet
blunt, in long caresses against her hot cheeks. He dragged it along her lips
until she parted them. It ran sideways against her moistened mouth and then he
pushed it into her left cheek. She reached around him, her palms on each
buttock, grasping the hard band of muscles. The Hound moaned as she guided him
down her throat.
She thought that she was getting better at these perverse kisses; she seemed to
understand what his body wanted her to do. The sound of his breath came out
like stones skipping on water.
Sandor sat down on the edge of the bed, his fingers twisting her hair away from
her face into the crook of her ear. His mouth nuzzled beneath that ear and she
tilted her head to the side to allow him access to her neck. “Use your hands
too, little bird,” he hissed.
She stroked the Hound with her hands as well as with her lips. One hand moving
up and down at the base of his penis, the other cradling his testicles, her
thumb stroking the seam. The Hound laughed, his cock jerking a little in her
mouth. What a strange joy, she giggled to herself. She discovered she liked the
sound of his laugh when his cock was in her mouth. She kissed him over and over
until his testicles hardened into a tight knot.
She felt her body being pulled back, her palms positioned so that she supported
her weight on her hands and knees like an animal. Sandor palmed her breasts
until her muscles tensed with waiting. A cock then slid along the cleft of her
buttocks before it pushed itself between her thighs. His penis dipped down,
then up, widening the distended lips. “Little bird … you ready for me?” he
rasped, pinching that button between her legs before he used his hands to sink
himself inside of her.
Sansa strangled a cry when he lodged himself all the way; it felt so much
fuller. Oh gods, it was just—good! The fullness of his thick penis, the small,
low grunts he made, the power and size of her happiness at the sensation of his
big body pumping into her
With a low groan, the Hound pushed his hips and put himself down the back of
her throat. He could have choked her if she had not gripped the base with her
hand. “Sorry,” he muttered.
They both paused for a ragged moment. She opened her mouth wider. Sandor began
to thrust again, gently, slowly, his hands anchored at her hips to keep her
from moving.
“You good?” the Hound asked. When she nodded, the rhythm quickened, Sandor’s
thrusts jamming her against the Hound. It became so very intense and her eyes
watered. The stretch inside of her burned. Her lips burned. Even her hips
burned from where Sandor’s hands clutched her. The thought that he was using
her— mouth, sex, her entire body—as a tool for his satisfaction made as much of
an effect as the sensation itself.
“Little bird … stop! Oh … shit! I'm going to come,” the Hound rasped. Sandor's
hand coiled around her neck, pulling her back. She looked up at the Hound as
her tongue scraped that tender indentation on the underside of his cock. He had
his head thrown back and she could see the line of his beautiful neck,
stretched and corded, the muscles there as taut as a bowstring. His whole body
seemed owned, as if his hands were bound in invisible rope. Then he looked down
at her.How funny, she thought, that eyes could really seem to burn with
passion. Just as the poets had claimed in those songs that had made her
childish self clasp her hand over her heart. Who had said that eyes are windows
to the soul? Sansa could not remember but at that moment, she believed it.
The moment broke with her surprised yelp. Sandor fell back on the bed, lifting
her with him until she lay prone on top of him. He braced himself so that her
shoulder blades lay set against his chest, his hands around her breasts and
waist, locking her to him. She bent her head away from his face as he began to
place ticklish kisses along the line of her jaw, making her squeal. Her legs
found his legs and she spread them so that they laid directly on top. He is so
wonderfully tall, Sansa thought as she caressed his hairy legs with the tips of
her toes—even with her toes pointed, her feet reached only halfway down his
calves.
Sandor turned her face aside, strong fingers on her cheek. “Do you want to
come, little bird?” Sandor said, brushing away the wetness he found there.
“Yes …” she said, the word sighing out of her parted mouth. 
He began to move. His thrusts were excruciatingly slow. In and out. Sansa moved
with him, the lift of their hips matching the intake of their breaths.
His fingers drifted to cupped her, feeling that pulse between her legs before
he used the vee of his fingers to spread her folds apart. “Kiss her, dog.”
She looked down and saw the black-haired head of the Hound. He began to nuzzle
her thighs as he had done so in the inn, left and right. She could hear his
almost laughter bubbling in his chest, feel his invisible smile. His tongue
darted out to suck on that spot. A tongue like water, neither harsh or
impatient, with no will other than to ease her into climax and hold her there
for as long as possible. “I could do this for all eternity,” he growled as
Sandor’s embrace tightened, holding her snugly from behind. The kisses and the
fullness of him inside of her was terrifying in its promise of how much better
it could get.
The hours seemed to jump off a cliff. Her body was twisted and moved about, in
a manner that made sense only in dream logic. One moment his broad chest
flattened her breasts, another moment it pressed against her shoulder blades.
His cock brushed her lips, she bent to kiss it and met his tongue; there was a
taste on it like nothing she had tasted before—sweet like almond milk and salty
like copper pennies. It was her excitement, she realized without a trace of
diffidence. She was on her back, cradling him in the vee of her thighs. She was
bent over, her spine folded like an open book, her face crushed into her
pillow. Her body hummed with constant unending pleasure, that hard button
between her legs fluttering, each spasm separate and distinct. It was as if her
body was the string of pearls and he was pulling the good feeling from her.
One. By. One.
“I'd like to die for you,” he rasped. She opened her eyes to little slits and
found the Hound’s penetrating gaze right there, above the hollow of her sex,
even as she could feel his mouth on her womb, licking, licking, while his cock
moved inside of her and his hands left no inch of skin untouched. She
knewexactly what he meant. Oh, she was so grateful; if she had loved him, being
this close to him would have killed her. 
An unnameable emotion passed between them, something beyond the body. Sansa’s
head became light, faintness blurring the edge of her vision. It was heavenly.
Sublime. Her soft moans filled the bedchamber, bouncing off every surface as
she fell into a deep well of pleasure. So clean and pure that she was lost in
the sensation.
Her limbs grew lax, her body as sleek and clean and shimmering as a fish. She
lost track of how many times she came. She half-feared she would never stop.
Their coupling seemingly danced outside of time itself. The featherbed crested
underneath his weight, its weirwood frame spilling forth lovely, strange
visions that filled her every nerve …
*****
She was a maiden lying underneath him. The soft strawberry stain of their
spring wedding night. The sound of his startled cry as he entered her. He bent
his forehead against hers, his hot breath gusting a strand of her hair loose.
He held his eyes closed for a moment before he opened them. “Look at me,” he
whispered and she did. She did.
Without taking his gaze from hers, he began to move. Her body lifted, rising
with each shallow breath. She put her hands on his biceps and felt him
trembling.
She was nowhere near the realm of female satisfaction when she caught the sweet
of his seed between her legs. Yet her nerves felt as if he had set them alight.
She was stunned, euphoric, completely undone.
In the dark, his fierce eyes glistened like wet rocks as she held him tightly
with her arms, with her sex.
And then he was kissing her, until her lips were reddened and swollen from
kisses as passionate as they were possessive …
 
*****
She was a mother lying underneath him. She touched herself and felt a crown of
thorns, little stitches where her baby's head had torn her like a piece of
parchment.
His lips pursed around a single nipple, kisses meant to draw delinquent drops
from tender, throbbing breasts. She could feel his penis, big and dry,
certainly his teeth. “I hate you,” she growled, a wounded she-wolf panting in
fear and blood and milk. She closed her eyes against the abrupt sting of tears.
Tears for the failure of her milk to flow, for her fragile body still leaking
its nine-month’s blood.
He buried his face in her hair, his thumbs wiping away the wetness that seeped
through her closed eyelids. With a whimper of relief, she turned towards him.
And then he was kissing her cheek; his jaw was rough with new beard but his
kisses were soft and tender, offering only solace, making no demands …
 
 *****
She was a crone lying underneath him. Long weaned from her children. He was
rubbing his beard on the soft sag of her belly, his tongue tracing the scars he
found there, so feminine and soft at the edges, battle wounds from no battle he
had ever endured. The flesh of his face was hard, creases cut from the years
spent facing down others until they fell back, the years of being himself faced
down and falling back. Into those unpredictable black rages that would scour
his brain, if not his heart.
“Little bird,” he rasped, his eyes peering up at her. His voice was soothing,
his arms still big and strong beneath the rolled up cuffs of a soft woolen
tunic.
His fingers hooked into the strings of her smallclothes, untying the knot and
pulling them down. He stared at her for a long moment, as if seeing the glimpse
of pink for the very first time. She smiled, both embarrassed and not
embarrassed. “The last, best piece of cunt in the world,” he said under his
breath, so low she almost didn’t hear it. Then he bent his head and kissed her,
licking deep into that place that held the mysteries of life and blood, not
just pleasure.
His kisses continued, no longer passionate, but frighteningly efficient. She
came with a low, small cry, her eyes open and watching him as his lips spread
wide in a crooked smile.
In the half-darkness they kissed, their teeth bumping gently together as if
they had never kissed before. Their gazes locked as they walked hand in hand
into a place beyond other places. Beyond the body.
Where fucking was the beginning of closeness and not the culmination. Where she
was young and he was young. Where they were young together.
 
 
***** First Song *****
] among mortal woman, know this
] from every care
] you could release me
]
] dewy riverbanks
] to last all night long
Sappho, Fragment 23
 
Sansa’s eyes lit upon the image reflected in the pool of water. She was lying
on her tummy on the forest floor, sniffing at the earth and peering at her
reflection like a young puppy. The dappled sunlight of the forest wavered over
her likeness, casting itself like a net over the girl. Her reflection
struggled, shifted, girlishness flipping inexplicably to womanhood and back
again. One moment she appeared a woman whose graces circumvented her youth; her
long thick lashes rimming her eyes like kohl, her breasts advancing and
straining the stretch of her gauzy white bedgown. The next she was a child,
cute in the way little girls were cute, with rounded cheeks as pink as apples
and a little chin with the hint of a second one underneath it.
So this is what fourteen looks like, she thought as she idly twisted the
necklace of Myranda’s dangling pearls between her fingers.
Sansa lifted up her chin, trying to make her face more severe, regal, strong.
I'm bastard-brave, I am not weak, Alayne threw back. The girl’s pouty lower lip
came out, calling attention to her vague resemblance to her cousin Sweetrobin.
But Alayne’s strength wasn't the kind of strength Sansa admired the most, the
strength that would protect those who could not protect themselves. She
strummed her fingers in the pool, scratching at the image of Alayne, until the
girl’s face could no longer be seen in the vibrations of the water.
“Why is your hair brown?” a familiar voice rasped.
Sansa turned around. He was seated near her on a moss covered stone, clad in
the brown-and-dun robes of a male penitent.The Quiet Isle, she thought. His
tantalizing physical proximity in the real world made her chuckle softly—that
the twisting and coiling pathways of their lives had brought them but a few
leagues from each other.
“My Aunt Lysa thought my hair made me resemble my lady mother too much and made
me darken it. Littlefinger brought me to her. I live in the Vale, under the
guise of his natural daughter. I’m only a few leagues from the Quiet Isle, from
you.”
Her eyes grew wide, both their attentions focused on the sword that lay across
his lap. “It’s beautiful,” she said, watching Sandor unsheathe it.
The scabbard was made from black lacquer with the lower length banded by golden
openwork of blades of grass, inlaid with three dogs made out of dragonglass.
The blade was breathtaking, resplendent—Valyrian—the steel rippled with red and
black streaks, so dark that it put Sansa in mind of Ice, her father’s
greatsword. The sight evoked her intensely, her childhood clinging to the
motion of Sandor’s hands wiping the blade as her father had once done.
“My father’s sword—” she was about to describe it but then remembered that the
Hound would have seen it up close. He was there the day Ser Ilyn had unsheathed
Ice from the scabbard on his back … the sword falling at the sound of her
prince’s words…  her father’s legs, jerking …
From the corner of her eye, she saw Sandor’s smirk go slack. With a wriggle,
she drew up her knees and pulled herself into a sitting position. She pulled on
the hem of her bedgown so that her legs were bare.
Her father’s sword was lost, broken in two—the steel reforged to be put into
the service of the Lannisters. The same fate that had befallen his daughter.I
will not be sad, she commanded as her toes curled in sensuous contact with the
earth. It was her nature, bent on its own survival, not to allow her brain to
dwell on loss. She wet her lips, quietly dousing her fury, and looked up,
smiling at him brightly.
Behind him, she saw the grove of ancient oaks. The great heart tree, its bark
as white as cream, its leaves like red rose petals, the merciless beauty of its
carved face. The air was spicy with the scent of flowers and the sound of
insects humming in the heat above their heads. The water of the pool where her
father once sat cleaning his sword was so dazzling in the radiance of the
sunlight that it made her mind ache.
“We’re in the godswood at Winterfell. The place where you long to be most,” he
rasped. Sandor tilted his head and closed his eyes. The gentle warmth of the
sun kissed his face. He held his eyes closed for a moment before he opened them
and resumed his polishing.
“I’ve been away for so long. How unreal it seems…” she said at last. In her
fancy, she began to imagine that she heard music. It seemed as if the wind
carried a melody to a song that she knew or thought she knew. Sweet and sad and
beguiling. Sansa strained to catch it but it seemed to be always receding from
her recognition, never nearer yet ever farther.
“Do you hear that tune, Sandor?” Even he seemed a part of the song, cleaning
his sword in time to the rhythm. Sandor raised one eyebrow and to her dismay
idly began to whistle the melody of Florian and Jonquil.
That made her mouth purse. She picked up a plait of her hair. With sudden
vehemence she unbraided, then smoothed the wayward brown locks with her
fingers. “I hate it. My father always loved the color of my hair,” she said,
though whether by father she meant Eddard Stark or Petyr Baelish was muddled in
her mind.
Sandor snorted. “You’re as distracting as ever, Sansa. Pretty as a prayer book,
no matter your hair color.”
“It’s not even ugly. Color of roasted nuts.”
“Or … tortoiseshell,” he routed at the sight of her face.
Or the fur of a bagged rabbit. Or a bastard beggar-girl. The brief memory of
Aunt Lysa's words flitted through her mind.You are well born and the Starks of
Winterfell were always proud but Winterfell has fallen and you are really just
a beggar now.
“Lady Lysa was unkind to you?” he barked suddenly. “Fat stinking cow,” he
rasped without waiting for her response.
“She said I was wanton,” Sansa replied tonelessly.I shouldn't feel sad for her
at all. She was a monster, like the envious, murderous stepmother from the
stories.
His face narrowed and his silence seemed to be one of pure incredulity. “Right
… You were a bruisable, fatherless child. Her sister’s daughter. She ought to
have protected you. Damn crazy cunt,” he spat. “There’s a special place in the
Seventh Hell reserved for betrayers of kin. She ought to be there, lodged head
up in blocks of ice with frost freezing her eyes so that she can’t cry.”
Sansa’s stomach rolled at thought of it. Aunt Lysa’s tears.Tears, tears, tears.
No need for tears but that’s not what you said in King’s Landing. You told me
to put the tears in Jon’s wine and I did. I wrote to Cateyln and told her the
Lannisters had killed my lord husband, just as you said.
“She dragged me to the Moon Door while her singer drowned out my screams by
playing ‘The False and The Fair.’ I didn’t want to kiss her husband. She
wouldn’t believe me. She would have murdered me if it hadn’t been for Petyr. He
saved me and then that singer—thenPetyr—” 
Sansa forced a sob back down into her chest. She refused to let it come out and
the effort made her throat convulse as if she was drowning. And so she
was—Alayne’s father was the sea, smiling surface and treacherous depths and the
smoothly savage creatures dwelling beneath that haunted her dreams.
“It was Petyr. He murdered them all. Aunt Lysa, Jon Arryn, my father. He
tainted the very air of the Seven Kingdoms with bloodshed.”
Her vision blurred. Something in her, a part of her spirit, bayed and howled
over the truth of Alayne’s situation, over the horror of it. In it. As dark as
any of Old Nan’s tales. The giant’s song from the tale of Princess Daeryssa
began to play in Sansa’s head. Be she alive or be she dead, I’ll grind her
bones to make my bread.
The Hound’s face became blood-darkened, his expression, his whole posture
taking on a ferocious edge. “What has he done to you? Made you his whore?”
“No. A septon must find Alayne Stone to be satisfyingly virgin or else all of
Littlefinger’s plans will be for nothing. And…”
Every man had one blindness. Petyr had taught her this himself, no matter how
clever the man might be. “He wants me to love him. He imagines himself the
huntsman coming along to cut the maiden free from the belly of the beast.
Trusting she's too stupid to notice that it was him who fed her to the creature
in the first place.”
Sandor waited for her to continue but she only shook her head. It was difficult
to explain, even to herself. She was bored with Alayne’s situation on one level
and incapacitated by it on another.
“Scheming, poxy whoreson. I'm going to cut out his bloody lying tongue after I
shove a sword up his delicate arse. Bugger him to the seven hells.” He stood up
and began to swing his sword. Sansa’s heart drummed wildly, a feeling of
pleasant awe washing over her. The sword wasalive in his hands, the gestures so
adept that her brothers would have given up their eyeteeth in a sack for a
quarter of his skill.
“A great sword—ah—” her chin pointed in the direction of the longsword, “a
great sword must have a great name.”
“Marvelous, isn't she? Do you see the way she glints in the sun? I imagine Just
Maid might have looked like this.”
Just Maid was an enchanted sword that belonged to the legendary knight Ser
Galladon. His valor was so great that it was said that the Maiden fell in love
with him and gave him Just Maid as a lover’s token.
“I squired for Gerion Lannister. He said that there was a dark charm about
Valyrian steel that makes it unspeakably desirable. Soggy-brained fool set sail
in search of the Lannister ancestral sword Brightroar. He never returned. They
say he traveled into the Smoking Sea itself. He was fond of Dornish Sour.
Sometimes when I’m drinking, I think of him and lost causes, hopeless dreams.”
Sandor’s look hardened at her, focused in a way that made no sense. “I was one
and twenty the last time I saw him. In a brothel in Lannisport. All I knew of
the sweetness of desire then was that it meant fucking or could be discharged
that way.”
He laughed. “Only in my dreams did I think to possess a Valyrian steel sword. I
suppose that's what this is: my wildest fantasy. I have my little bird and I
have Black Dog, everything I want, right at my feet.”
“A black dog is a portent of death in the North. Is it the same in the
Westerlands?” Sansa thought of his huge warhorse. Whom he had soominously named
Stranger. “Your obsession with being dark is adorable,” she said, covering her
giggling mouth with the palm of her hand.
The Hound gave her a forbearing look, a roll of his eyes and she became afraid
that he had taken her teasing too seriously. But then a grin appeared, “The
name suits him. Other men have said that horse was whelped in hell. Bit off the
ear of a monk who tried to geld him.” The grin broadened, a sudden odd
boyishness on his hard features. 
How staggeringly young he looks, she thought. For a brief moment, he felt more
like her son than a man fifteen years her senior. Out of context and out of the
grave, her mind turned to Bran. He was her favorite sibling—quick to smile,
easy to love, as enamored with the stories and songs as she was once upon a
time. She would lie beside him on his bed, holding his hand and watching the
dust motes dance in the sunlight of his chamber as they spun together tales of
the knight's quests he would go on once he was a man grown. What daring deeds
he would perform: monsters slain, imperiled maidens rescued.
“What were you like as a boy?” She realized she wanted him to have a hidden
idealistic side.
“Half as ugly, twice as stupid. Head full of high-flown claptrap about knights
and their buggering tales.”
“What was your favorite tale?” She leaned towards him, whispering loudly, “Ser
Serwyn's my favorite.” Oh how she ardently longed to have more things in common
with him, rather than less.
He bent his heavy eyebrows at her. Embarrassment invaded her expression. She
thought of Alayne in her bath, staring at that tapestry. The girl biting her
lip, fruitlessly stroking, dimly aware that there was a cryptic incantation for
pleasure that she could never quite dare name.
The Hound broke into an abrupt bark of laughter, “What happened to that fool
and his cunt?”
Sansa wrinkled her face. “Why that was a thousand years ago. When I was still a
little girl.”
That wasn't quite the whole of it. There was something else too. “Ser Dontos,
he … he would call me his sweet Jonquil.” The words came out haltingly, she
mumbled them, consciously lowering her gaze. “And now I always think of him
whenever I hear that song. Petyr said Ser Dontos would have betrayed me. I
believed it once; now I’m not so sure. I think Ser Dontos wanted to be my true
knight. He insisted on wearing his surcoat with the arms of House Hollard
instead of his fool's motley when we fled the Red Keep after Joffrey's murder.
How he wept when I called him my savior.”
The sniffle that she had held back caught her by surprise. Ser Dontos had been
the first to help her that day Joffrey had his knights beat and strip her in
the lower bailey. He had tried to transform Joffrey’s violent fury into
laughter by hitting her on the head with a melon. She had not thought of Ser
Dontos in years and her pity for her poor drunken Florian was like the
rediscovery of a sensation in a numb limb.
Sansa risked a sideways glance at Sandor. He stared back at her, his face
blank. Not a clue as to why she should feel sorrow for someone like Ser Dontos,
his life worth less than the toad's.I wonder if he’s ever felt something for
someone besides me, she thought. She did not think so. The sadness, the sorrow
had been for her and her alone.
“Yes, my favorite tale was of Ser Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. After I was
burned, my father bought a tapestry of his exploits. It hung in my chamber as a
consolation. I would spend hours in my sickbed daydreaming that I was Ser
Serwyn and Gregor was the evil dragon Urrax.”
“Did you also dream of rescuing Princess Daeryssa from the giants?” she asked
with a tiny quiver in her voice.
Sandor laughed miserably. “Now that was a fantasy as old as memory. I was cunt-
struck since I could walk, sniffing round the skirts of every pretty girl who
looked at me …”
“I'd wander through the dark forests on my black horse Stranger, with my
Valyrian steel sword Black Dog at my side. It was a perilous quest. Lost
princesses are never planted in comfortable inns alongside the Kingsroad. I'd
climb unscalable cliffs, fight off monsters—dragons in the sky, krakens from
the depths of the sea, firewyrms in the bowels of the earth. I knew that she
was out there somewhere but she was not to be seen.”
“What did you do when you found her?” she said breathlessly. The wish she made
in the lonely wilderness came back to her.He'll slay my enemies and win my
love. He'll take me back to Winterfell and we'll be ever so happy for ever and
ever …
She wanted to hear him say the words, to end the story as they all ended. The
gallant knight on horseback coming to release the princess with a kiss.
“The standard dogshit. Big, swooping heroics,” Sandor said, with a wry pull of
his mouth. “I'd kill the giants that held her captive. Gather her up in my
arms, feel the beat of her little ivory heart, and lean down to press a gentle
kiss to those rosebud lips.”
“Then I'd lead her back to the safety of her kingdom where I would end my days
receiving her bottomless gratitude,” the Hound sniggered, making a perplexing
gesture using his tongue in his cheek and the fist of his right hand.
“After I was burned, I put that fantasy aside. The only game girls wanted to
play with me was monsters-and-maidens.” His voice took on a dangerous edge, “It
would make any man furious—no wife, no sons, no daughters, no lands, no claim
on anything but a steel sword.”
He looked at her accusingly, with that sullen, hateful stare that he could
command. “Princess Daeryssa would have forsaken me. Spurned my sword. Shunned
my kisses. Closed her eyes because—”
“She wouldn't have forsaken you—” Sansa’s face went brutally still. The
commotion rose up inside her, fury, outrage, “if only you—” Like a tantrum she
couldn't control, would not control, the words welled up, overflowed, “if you
had been gallant, if you had been gentle. Instead of a rotten man who made
nasty, mean threats to a 'bruisable, fatherless child'. The girls in the songs
and stories were always merciful, good, impossibly kind.”
As quickly as his anger came, it vanished in the face of her righteous
indignation. “As you say, little bird. My apologies, my lady,” he muttered, his
face downcast.
“Don’t look here for absolution, my lord.” She ruined the gravity of the moment
by laughing—his grey eyes had peeked up at her with the look of a wretched dog,
starved for a kind word.
Sandor smirked a little then his mouth twisted into a grimace. “Sansa … you're
too old for this shit. It’s nothing but a bunch of consolatory nonsense. We
tell them to children and idiots to obscure the real conditions of life. I
threw all that shit away when I was twelve, when I became a man. You should
have too. Put them aside when you put aside dolls and skipping.”
He had been rough-tongued with her before, yet these words, gently delivered,
wounded her in a sharper and deeper manner than he could have intended.
Everyone mocked her for her love of songs and stories. She knew they were
silly, she wasn't childish about them. Not anymore. They were powerful, of the
same substance and logic as dreams, a private realm where all her anxieties
played out. Where things happened for no reason, great trials, accidental
gifts, sudden twists of fortunes. She took comfort in them, their innocent and
honorable heroines whispering to her of the secret of spinning straw into gold,
fear into courage, misery into joy.
She gazed at him moist-eyed but in perfect control. Softly she said, “If I
threw all them away, I'd be throwing away more than songs and stories. I'd be
throwing away myself.”
In a barely perceptible tone, she added, “As you had.”
Sandor held her look for a long time, his expression strange and
indecipherable. Then his gaze drifted away. “Do you remember when I came to
your bedchamber after your father's death?”
Sansa nodded and frowned. She had lain in her bed for days in the deep lethargy
of first grief. Desperately tired of being alive, yet terrified at the prospect
of death. She imagined every footstep near her chamber door belonged to Ser
Ilyn but the mute headsman never appeared. Instead, it was Joffrey and his dog.
Her odious prince had commanded the Hound to get her out of bed. How terrified
she had been at the sight of him, his burned face even more hideous in the
unkind morning light. Sandor had scooped her up, his arms hooking underneath
her knees, lifting her off the featherbed. As she struggled feebly under his
iron hold, her blanket had fallen to the floor so that only a thin white
bedgown covered her nakedness.
“All those stupid boyhood daydreams came rushing back to me as I held you. A
pristine bundle of child-woman in her little white dress. Barefoot with the
scent of lemons in her hair. It was as if you had been called forth from out my
mother’s prayer book—The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow
with eyes like deep blue pools— to rejuvenate me with a vengeance.”
The Hound took a deep breath and let it out in a heave of frustration.
“Extremely beautiful and extremely young and so fucking helpless. Like every
birdbrained cunt from the stories. Princess Daeryssa. Lady Shella. Jenny of
Oldstones. Jonquil. Those nameless ladies too, the maiden in the tower, the
sleeping beauty, the cinder-smudged orphan. Your bare arms prickling with
gooseflesh, your little ivory heart beating so hard I could see it pulsing in
your throat.”
“That twice-damned bright early light shone through the threadbare fabric.
I saw you, underneath your fluttering white bedgown, the ripening teats with
their pink tips, the dark flame of your …”
The Hound's eyes grew flat, vacant, like a man possessed. “I would have slit
the throat of the High Septon himself to see but a half-glimpse of the pink.
Seven bloody hells, every inch of my skin felt twitchy. What dog could resist?”
His pupils dilated as they did when he was entering her. “Morning milk,
fresh,wholesome, still warm in the pail.”
He laughed suddenly, his tongue darting out to lick the edge of his front
teeth. “The cream at the top so thick and rich you want to eat it up with your
the tip of your tongue.”
“I went to a winesink that night and got so blindingly drunk that I fell asleep
in a wet ditch. Where I dreamt I kissed your eyes and cheeks and mouth and neck
and—” with the point of his longsword, he hooked the hem of her bedgown and
lifted it until it pooled just below the area where her thighs started “—hair.”
“Until you laid down with me. Weren’t you just the gentlest creature? Sweet as
spun sugar. No sharp edges. And I kept you against me all night while I licked
you like a—”
“Dirty dog …” she saw Sandor's hands clenching tighter around the hilt of
sword, white-knuckled. “A filthy man near thirty sniffing around the flounce of
a young girl's skirts, looking for the missed opportunities of boyhood. Bloody
pathetic.”
He made a sound of disgust but his eyes remained transfixed at the area between
her thighs, his nostrils flaring. “What a monstrous lust,” he released in an
agonized breath. “I hadn't known I had been so empty until you filled me. To
bursting.”
She could smell it, the scent of the loneliness that dogged him in King's
Landing, as if it was a perfume that could be distilled. The acrid odor of
broken jugs of wine, the faint sourness of soiled clothing, the withered pride
of a greasy oilcloth lying next to the immaculate gleam of sharpened steel, all
compounded with the sawtooth edge of semen and the honey sweet fragrance of the
beeswax candles lit at the Maiden's altar.
She thought of Alayne eating the mystery knight’s apple in the privacy of her
dark bedchamber. The girl was so crushingly alone and friendless that the
burden and the incapacity to communicate its heavy weight to anyone made her
quietly shake as her teeth pierced the skin of the apple. How lonesome the body
became after sunset. How often the mind would turn to the thought of the act. A
boy like Harrold Hardyng could not steal her sleep or break her reserve. She
hungered to flirt, to kiss, to know a man who was brave, gentle, strong.
“Maybe I am a lady from the songs and stories. I'm the bespelled princess who
slept for a thousand years. How else to explain how I found you in my sleep?”
She smiled, her nerves set alight. She lifted her bedgown higher and higher
until it bunched around her waist, astonished by her own explicitness.
Time to smile and smell sweet and be his lady love.
Sandor approached her. “Little bird,” he murmured. His hands petted her tummy,
the coarse wool of the sleeve of his brown and dun robes scratching her skin.
His hands moved lower. She lay there softly panting. “Brother Sandor, give me
something to repent,” she said with a nervous giggle.
She felt him curl his hand tightly around the hem of her bedgown before
smoothing it down so that it fell well past her knees. Sansa inwardly cringed,
her tongue testing to find the right courtesies but her throat choked back
every clumsy one. He rolled on top of her, kissing away her mortification, then
settled himself against her back. They held each other for a long time like two
children, uncovering their friendship, conceding their closeness.
He had a way of leaving long, interested silences that made her want to fill
them with honest, meaningful words. It was so very nice, as nice—no, even
nicer—as laying with him. What an impossible luxury to be able to put aside her
armor of courtesy. Sansa always wore it, slept and lived in it, as a soldier on
the march.
Time swayed to a slow lulling rhythm.
Finally, she stretched and sat up, her knees tucked to her chin, gazing down at
her feet as they peeked out from the hem of her gown. Sandor sat up beside her,
putting one arm around her shoulder, patting her arm. It was a special gesture,
affection between equals, between men, reserved for brothers-in-arms who had
fought battles side by side. How sweetly thrilling. It filled her with the
sense that she was his equal in courage.
She swung her arm around him. They sat like that, arms around each other’s
shoulders, each admiring the other’s reflection in the bright pool. She leaned
down and caressed his big toe with the tip of her finger. He had hairy toes,
like an animal, like a dog. She thought of the First Men who had bred dogs from
wolves to keep them safe as they slept by their fires. 
Get her a dog, she'll be happier for it, King Robert had told her father. She
chortled, thinking that perhaps southron King Robert possessed a mustard seed
of greensight.
Her eyes widened and she let out a small chagrined breath. “Did you … did you
follow me? At night, around the Red Keep?” she asked. Sandor Clegane had always
seemed to be skulking around in some dark corner whenever she found herself
alone.
“I liked your company. I liked the way we talked,” he confessed. She turned to
face him, her mouth hanging open. She shook her head.
“How could I have felt anything different?” he challenged. He started to say
something else before sucking in his breath then looked down.
“You have the prettiest toes” — his fingers caressed the skin — “as pink and as
soft as a babe's. I'd like to clean between my teeth with one of your dirty
silken stockings.” 
She wrinkled her face. “You're nasty.” Her laugh bubbled up from surprise,
pleasure, a silly giggle she tried to contain then gave up. “You have a way
with words. You could have been a poet.” She wondered if she could inspire him
to do such a thing. Not those mean-tempered verses about being stronger than
her, of course. The kind of songs that Bael the Bard must have sung to win the
love of a daughter of Winterfell.
“You have a head as full of pigeons as an empty turret, girl,” Sandor replied
with a roll of his eyes.
Sansa laughed and sighed both. “I used to do that—compose poems and songs—as a
girl in Winterfell. I would play them for my family after supper. I even had a
little lute to accompany me.” I thought I could summon a prince with my songs,
she thought with great pity and no small affection for her younger self.
“Perhaps I’ll compose a poem about you. You’re one to make the maidens faint,”
she said quietly, placing her hand on his muscled thigh. Why, any true lady of
discernment could see that he bordered on the magnificent, the way his massive
black courser was magnificent. From the wide jaw to the broad back, well-
muscled loins, long legs with their dense, heavy bones. Perfectly made. A beast
bred from foalhood for the needs of war. In peacetime … a perverse image
flooded her brain. The Hound harnessed like a draft horse, his face blood-red
from the strain of pulling a heavy wagon, its wheels moaning and creaking, from
a deep muddy ditch.
Sandor snorted, withheld a laugh, then became serious. “I’d like to see you
try, little bird.”
She gave him a sidelong look, holding his gaze for a longish pause. Then she
mimicked strumming her fingers as if she was playing the lute to the melody of
‘Let Me Drink Your Beauty.’
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The high lords with old names,
Knights puffed up on their fame,
And those who are very well hung …  
Sansa ended the song with a slide up his thigh. Sandor let his head fall back,
laughing, his laughter rattling itself out from somewhere deep inside his
chest, so violent that it dislodged her fumbling hands. She smiled with
pleasurable embarrassment and then laughed too, noisily. The knuckle of one
hand went to her mouth, while the other wrapped around her ribcage, containing
the tremors of her breasts.
His eyes immediately gave full attention to that region and his laugh became
dirty, irresistible, moving across empty space to insinuate itself around her.
Sansa pushed him on his back suddenly, all of her weight falling against his
chest. He cocked an eyebrow and grinned at her. But instead of kissing him, she
shoved his brown and dun robes aside and put her ear to his bare belly. She
tickled his sides lightly with her fingertips. His laughter came out in raspy
burbles, belly-deep, as free as a child’s uninhibited laughter. Her cheek
pressed even harder against his warm abdomen, so that her face should fall and
rise with the vibrating swells. She wanted this, to perform for him, sing
songs, tell jokes, tease. Anything to exert this power she had discovered she
had over him: to make him laugh, to make him happy for a moment.
She sighed deeply, feeling the profound shift of her spirit, like the calving
of a glacier. The sound of it stirred ever so slightly the hairs on his bare
belly.
“What.” It wasn't a question, just a blunt expression of disbelief. “What,” he
repeated.
“I love you, Sandor.”
Her muscles went lax and the very blood in her veins seemed to be coursing in a
freer way. She lifted her head from his stomach and saw him giving her one of
his attentive stares.
The moment he met her eyes, he started cackling uncontrollably. It sounded
dreadful, the laughter of a villain from a mummer's farce, the man who
possessed what he did not deserve. “Bloody confounding. I can't believe I
caught you. You're too beautiful. Too clean. Too soft. Too willing.”
She blinked, “It’s not confounding. Young girls are not so very different from
dogs. We're both such biddable creatures. The one who respects our intrinsic
nature and makes no threats gets what they want out of us soon enough.”
He looked at her, his eyes growing solemn, his mouth twisting into a strange
smile, sweetness tinged with melancholy. She closed her eyelids as she laid her
head back down on his abdomen. Her love for him did not deny harsh
truths—rather it transcended them.
The palms of his hands began stroking her hair, broad strokes, as if she was a
soft, small creature sniffing and mousing around him.
“Girls and dogs … that’s the meat of it isn’t it? Couldn’t have bloody well
felt anything different, could I? No girl ever expended that level of intensity
of awareness on me as you did. I wanted to be close to you so badly. Hold you
tenderly and overpower you at the time.” He drew a heaving breath. “Seven Hells
…” A breath again. “There aren't words. Just the memory of so
much—frustration—I felt as though it would cleave me in two,” he laughed, that
crazy, frantic sound of his, half-chuckle, half-sob.
She growled at him playfully, rubbing her face in his chest as Lady used to do
with her. Even as she was performing her silly antics, his words worked away in
her brain: to cleave was the only word she knew that meant both one thing and
its opposite. To tear apart and to join together.
Sandor yanked her up by her waist until her face was directly in front of his.
“I love you, Sandor,” she said. He kissed her ferociously. Lips, tongue, teeth,
gums, the inside of her cheeks, the tip of her throat, entering her mouth more
thoroughly than she would ever have imagined a man might want to.
She placed her hand on his chest and felt the tha-tha-thump of his heartbeat,
so startlingly violent that it surely could break ribs. Happiness, she
recognized it intuitively. It only lasted in its purest, richest form for the
length of heartbeats.
I want to live in this moment forever, Sansa thought. Impossibly, his kiss
deepened. He stole her breath, as if he would live off the air in her lungs.
Gasping for air, the weight of her hand had not yet began to push back with any
degree of firmness when Sandor abruptly ended the kiss, flipping her over onto
her back. Then he stood up, walking towards the pool.
“Sandor,” she panted after him.
He didn’t turn around, lapping up the water held in the cup of his hands.
“Oh, shit,” she heard him mutter. His fingers rippled the still water of the
pool.
The music had stopped for a count of three.
Sansa’s eyes whitened, widened. Her reflection emerged from the pool. Arms
raised as if she was a Lysene dancer.
A beam of sunlight was directly shining on the creature. She was lovely beyond
imagining: elegant, lean haunches, delicately boned, her body covered in
wolfish hairs so fine they were invisible. When the creature glided across the
water, the sunlight followed. In her wake, Sansa could see dust motes, swirling
ecstatically around her like a retinue of millions of tiny little sparrows,
hopelessly attracted to her, wanting only to follow her.
Sansa watched as her reflection approached Sandor's reflection. How odd it was
for them to witness their reflections move of their own free will, yet Sandor
did not appear much surprised by it, the extent of his consternation no more
than knitted brows.
The creature came face to face with Sandor’s reflection. The sight of those
brown and dun robes made her irritable—they seemed like a costume—and the
creature angrily tore them away. After she had done so, she turned that perfect
face and looked directly at Sansa.
She smiled.
A smile so magnificent and devastating that it both warmed and hurt. It was a
smile straight from the canvases of old Valyrian paintings. Straight from a
prayer book. The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow with eyes
like deep blue pools …
Old Nan had told Sansa tales of wargs and skinchangers, humans that could wear
the skins of animals. Was there an inverse? She could feel the creature inside
of her, walking the hairs on her arms, sending the shiver that travelled down
her spine to inhabit all of her tightening muscles. The melty feeling possessed
her. Sansa licked the edge of her front teeth just as she spied the creature's
tongue coming out, long and deep-rose pink, to suck him swollen.
Sandor's voice drifted low, “You said you never wanted to live in the world
again. You meant it?”
She looked at him as if the question itself was incomprehensible. “Why do you
ask?”
Sandor didn't bother to respond. He closed his eyes, his head rolling back, his
teeth bared like a man wounded.
Maester Luwin said there is nothing in dreams I need fear, Sansa told herself.
She turned to examine the heart tree, its carved face smiling when it should
have been melancholy. The air was fragrant, spicy with the scent of flowers
when it should have smelled of mushroom-moist soil and sweet rot.
And that heretical noise. A song playing in a sacred place where there should
be no sound at all, lest it disturb the brooding ghosts of her oath-bound
forefathers.
Oh, how long would she lie to herself?
“Do you know what that noise is, Sandor?” He seemed a part of this place,
adding his own tremendous force to the pull of its mysterious life and will.
“Insects humming.” He huffed a low breath. “What of it?”
“They're singing. The song of summer cicadas,” she replied with unshakable
certainty, though she had never heard the sound before. Lord Petyr had insisted
that Alayne's education include the masculine subjects her parents and her
Septa had neglected: law and accounting, warfare, politics and religion,
commerce and agriculture.
“They don't live in the Seven Kingdoms. Only in the lands across the Narrow
Sea. I ate one once on a dare. It had been rolled in honey and spices. Petyr
said they were a delicacy from Meereen.” Her alarm became tangible, a
declension of voice, an acceleration of breathing. “In Lys, the people consider
them sacred. Their coins are stamped with their love goddess on one side and
the cicada on the obverse.”
That old book of Valyrian tales she kept by her bedside appeared so vividly in
her mind that it seemed as if she could smell the sweet mustiness of the
antique paper, see that specific page: the one whose edge was thinned by her
licked thumb moving over it a hundred times.
“There's a story about these insects that dates back to Old Valyria. Once upon
a time, before the birth of song, cicadas were ordinary humans. When song
entered the world, some men and women were so struck by the pleasure of it that
they sang continuously, forgetting to eat and drink until they perished. From
these men and women, the race of cicadas arose. From birth they require no
nourishment, singing, always singing, in a perpetual state of intoxicated
ecstasy until they wither and die.”
Sansa couldn't see the cicadas but she could feel their eyes. They were staring
down at her and Sandor from their great height, singing in chorus. “They were
deformed by their desire until they became ignobly bound to it. Men and women
who declined humanity and were cursed for it.”
“Cursed?” the Hound's mouth held a derisive curl. His burned mouth twitched; it
exposed her worst suspicions.
“They were smart buggers.”
His jaw set moodily. “The world's a little dark cage and outside of it is this.
Where the true sun shines, where one’s lady love—” He brushed her lips with his
thumb, still wet from the water. She paused, then let it slide into her mouth.
The wetness trickled down her throat. The flavor was clean, biting, as bracing
to her taste buds as meltwater. Wildly, extravagantly delicious. Like his spit
but more potent, infinitely more potent. She felt the heat of it behind her
eyes. It was otherworldly.
A lifetime of sweetness, the waters of their out-of-time marriage bed,
thousands upon thousands of fevered beads of sweat, distilled and collected
into the pure and clean pool before her. Sansa tensed her fists. Gods be good.
She was going to cry. The intensity of it was daunting and she pinched her eyes
shut to stop the welling of tears. Her body hummed to the point of near
severance—reaching towards a pleasure so far outside her knowledge and
experience, it threatened a break.
“All I wanted to do after I left King’s Landing was drink until I was dead to
the world. Those wine-soaked dreams—such damnable sweetness. Your wet cunny.
Your thankful tongue.” An edge crept into his voice. “What the fuck are you
looking for? What has your life been, girl? What else is in store for you,
pretty little bird?”
Sandor's hands seized her neck as if she was an intransigent child he had
caught by the scruff. “Look,” he ordered.
She opened her eyes to slits. Sandor's reflection had his mouth buried between
her reflection's legs, kissing the creature so that she was —“Wet enough to
fuck?” he supplied.
The Hound's reflection had the creature pinned on all fours, his hands gripping
her waist in an iron grasp. He pulled her onto his cock, a thick, burning pain.
Fuck, it was a fitting word to describe what he was doing. Sansa silently
mouthed the word, the roughness of the sound of c  in her throat matching the
slam of his cock. He pulled out slowly, the tendons in his arms straining, his
face an ugly snarl.
“I want to be inside of you so bad,” the Hound rasped as his reflection spread
the creature's buttocks wide with his fingers, bringing her even closer to him.
Sandor's eyes darkened until they were all pupil.
“I want to wear the fur of your cunt like a wolf-lined coat, sleep curled up in
the marrow of your bones, our blood indistinguishable, two dark rivers mingling
together. One flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever, and cursed be the
one who comes between them.” He had recited a passage from The Seven-Pointed
Star, the last lines the septon would say when sanctifying a marriage.
Another thrust. Like the one before. The slow withdraw then the deep plunge,
his pelvis thudding against her reflection's buttocks. Another thrust, then
another and another, faster, faster, faster, all attempts to be gentle
abandoned. He fucked her reflection as if he had no volition, driving into her
as if he could not get deep enough with brutal paroxysms of muscles. The
creature trembled like a half-broken horse. Blunt pain but a brilliant pleasure
hiding behind it. She stole a climax from him, the good feeling coming like a
sudden slap, hard enough that it left Sansa's nerves twitching in raw
discomfort. Immediately the creature went lax, her cheek and belly brushing the
floor, relieved to let him do with her as he pleased. The Hound's reflection
used her roughly, as a common soldier would use his slut.
Sansa watched them. She found the tableau both abominable and mindlessly
pleasurable at the same time. The sight of his cock moving in and out of her.
Delicate and shining wet, partially seen, partially concealed by a light tuft
of copper curls.Impossible to believe that I could contain something like that,
someone like him, within so small a space, she thought.
“Little bird, little bird …”  Sandor keened, the roar of a poor dumb beast
howling in rage and pain.
She turned to look at him. He had his hands locked over his head and his
terrible burnt face tilted to the sky. The sun cast shadows over it, painting
him with stripes of light and darkness.
“Water after a fucking eternity in the desert—” He sucked in a harsh breath of
air between his teeth and then he began anew. “I'm happy. I feel happy. You
make me happy. You have to hold on to that feeling. Lose it and it leaves a
killing wound for having existed in the first place.” 
Grey eyes locked on every part of her face, waiting for a tic of emotion. The
fixed stare of a serpent,  Sansa thought, her nails digging into her hand. One
day I'll have a song from you, whether you will it or no. He wasn’t her friend
any longer but rather her enemy, a monster from whom she must run.
The Hound threw back his head and roared. His laughter sounded like it always
did. It’s my perception that changes, not him, she realized, profoundly
disillusioned. Now it sounded like a rusty iron gate that refused to open all
the way. The kind that would catch her silks and tear them if she tried to
squeeze through it.
“Go on, run, you won’t get very far,” he said.
As quick as a wild hare, she scrambled from the ground, putting several paces
between them. She hid behind the weirwood tree as if it she could claim
sanctuary from it.
He stood up, swaying slightly like a battle-dazed knight behind his visor. He
seemed to grow even taller, grotesquely tall, looming over her like a basilisk,
ready to strike. Sansa stumbled backward with a little cry. Her chest hurt, the
very blood in her heart felt like it was turning to lead. This dream, one
exquisite pleasure after another, was taking on the proportion of a nightmare.
Her brain mapped the quickest path from the godswood to the crypts where she
could lose him in the twisting passageways that no stranger to Winterfell would
be able to decipher.
“Stay,” the Hound ordered. He shifted forward an inch. That predatory smile
began to pull harder at his mouth, though he tried to keep it back, out of
sight. 
In her agitation, she glared at him with real savagery. Black Dog’s hilt was
agleam in the faint sunlight.
“Easy, easy, I won't take another step,” Sandor said. His eyes told her she
could not get to it even if she wished. She understood that he knew to a fine
degree just how far she was away from it, foresaw every possibility of her
movements. She gave a faint dry sob. She wanted to weep and she wanted to wound
him at the same time.
Sansa clamped her hand over her mouth to stop the wailing.
“Gentle Mother,” Sandor breathed. “Pick up the blade, girl, and I'll let you
kill me with it.”
He turned his eyes downwards, gouging the soil with his feet. Underneath the
upturned earth, bugs wriggled on their back, twitching, their pale, segmented
bellies up.
He spoke to the ground, his rasp rougher than usual. “Here's a story for you,
little bird. Two children sleeping in their lonely beds far apart from one
another. They share the same dream night after night, their fantasies bridging
the distance that the day imposes. But come dawn, a fire moves along the rope
of memory that binds them together. When they awake, they remember nothing.
They know nothing. Changing back from the people they wish they were, into the
people they used to be.”
As he spoke, a memory that had been previously too indistinct to catch suddenly
stood out clearly. An invisible red skein that billowed between them. The skein
became solid in the dream realm, so solid that their dreaming selves could see
it, move their hands along its length until they found each other in the heart
of the wilderness within.
“Are the gods so cruel? Will I never see you again?” Sansa squeezed her eyes
shut but no tears came to relieve the awful tension. The wound ran too deep and
all her tears were internal, like blood.
As if by witchy magic, a sudden gust of wind was born. The lithe arms of the
heart tree swayed, autumn leaves spiraling on the breeze, the very air itself
transforming into song.
The First Song. Music to set a thousand hearts abloom.
The singsong of the cicadas grew ever louder, a delirious, enthralling crooning
that she could somehow understand.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She was the princess of a savage
country where it snowed even in the middle of summer and the winters were so
cold a child's laughter would freeze in her throat and choke her to death. The
children of this land grew up unimaginably fast for their lives were grim and
they lived close to the hard-packed earth. But the girl was very pretty, honey
sweet, and sheltered by her father and mother as a rare rose is sheltered from
the frost by being kept in a glass house.
As was the way of these stories, the girl found herself alone, a babe lost in
the woods. A path led her to a crossroads and it was here where she stood as
still as a post buried in the ground. She was to be given the choice between
reality and dreams. One path was a bridge of knives, their handles human bones,
their pommels the skulls of wolves whose bleeding eye sockets cried out for
justice. The other path was a bower of roses where her lover’s song would build
a bed for her to slumber in the twilight life-in-death of an animal form.
“This is our true life upon this earth,” the girl's beloved rasped.
The world grew low-lit, a golden pleasure garden where beautiful music played
endlessly. The girl was both dancing light and sinking into the receptive
earth, licking, sucking … midnight, summer, collapsing into the immensity of
time … no self, only the prickling heat that began in her sex and vibrated
until her entire body was the organ—
“I'm the Princess of Winterfell, I'm the Princess of Winterfell, I'm the
Princess of Winterfell …” the girl plaintively cried the chaining repetition of
her name.
The heart tree dropped its bright leaves to make a crimson carpet at her feet.
They were all horribly wrong: they should have been dark red, like a thousand
bloodstained hands. The hands of her family. Lady, her father, Bran, Rickon,
Robb, her mother, Arya, murdered or lost to the wind. Until Jon Snow, the last
drop of blood in her heart and a thousand leagues from her, was all that she
could claim.
A leaf brushed her cheek, as light as the scratch of an insect's legs. Yet the
weight of it shot through her with such emotional force that she felt dizzy and
light-headed; the very earth seemed to move, pulling her back in time to a
luminescent moment, as unblurred to her as if it had happened only yesterday.
****
Aren't you just a little afraid of the terrible evil beasts, Bran? 
Father says that the only time a man can be brave is when he's afraid. 
So I will be the bravest of all. I've been shaking in my boots since I could
walk.
You have courage, Sansa. Mother’s courage. The courage of the ladies in the
songs.
What is courage? 
The wise endurance of the soul. 
You didn't make that up. 
An ancient dragonlord famous for his wisdom. Maester Luwin is making me read
his writings. 
The wise endurance of the soul … what does that even mean? 
****
“I'm going to kill Littlefinger,” she said, her heart pounding frantically.
“Do you think dragons get smaller up close, girl? They don't.” Sandor lifted
his face from the ground. “They get fucking bigger!” The roar of his voice was
loud enough to reverberate the waters of the pool.
Afterwards, he stood still, the muscles in his shoulders and neck stiffening.
“Why?” he asked sharply, his hands flexing with a motion that showed all
throughout his body, as if he was pressing against a great weight. “Gods’ pity,
why?”
The girl had been given a choice and the act of choosing was the
transformation. Her thump of her heartbeat slowed. “Family. Duty. Honor.”
There was none of the disgust or rage she had expected. Only a mystified look.
As if she had spoken in riddles that made no sense.
“Eddard Stark was my sire, the Young Wolf my brother. I am the blood and seed
of Winterfell.”
The Hound laughed as if she was a backward child who had just said something
very stupid. “Spare me,” he laughed again.
Even to her own ears it sounded like a silly boast. How could she make him
understand? The clear waters she drank as a thirsty child still ran in her
veins and no other waters could make her forget.
“Your brother didn't have the wits the gods gave a toad,” he heaved, having
laughed himself to tears. “The mighty Eddard Stark, fuck his bloody heroics!
What a feeble legacy. No wonder Starks are so scarce on the ground. Harebrained
fools, you lot.” Sandor's eyes glistened and he wiped his face, then wiped it
again, and again, before he gave up. “What’s going to happen to you?”
The tears rose, filling his mouth and he swallowed them. His mouth moved but no
sound came out. Speaking was beyond him. For a long dreadful moment, the
silence between them was filled with the giant's song, twisting and permuting
in their aching minds.Be she alive or be she dead, I'll grind her bones to make
my bread. Meaningless words learned as a child, repeated mindlessly now as a
portent of her epitaph.
“Stay,” he begged, his voice a guttural hoarseness while she stared at him dry-
eyed. He lifted his hand toward her, palm open.
Sandor held his hand out until it began to shake.
She made a small step towards him and he covered their distance in a couple of
strides. She took his hand but before he could move to embrace her, she knelt
on the ground.
Sansa bussed his knuckles as if he was her liege lord. “I'm sorry, Sandor. I'm
sorry. I cannot. I know you can't understand.”
She turned his wrists and kissed his hard-closed fingers. When she looked up at
him, his mouth was set in a grimace. With each breath he took, the muscle in
his cheeks drew taut—whether in pain or fury, she couldn't tell.
“I love you,” she whispered.
He swallowed, staring at the empty space before him. The fingers of his hand
grew lax, opening to let her kiss them. He turned to face her again and his
expression was mournful: the sort of look reserved for lost causes, hopeless
dreams, last chances used up and gone.
Then he moved his hand and held her chin between his iron fingertips, rubbing
the skin there. He surveyed her for a long moment.
“Look at you. Bloody green,” he rasped. “The Maid brought him forth a girl as
supple as a willow … That’s what you are—a branch snapped off a willow tree.
Flexible, full of buds. As likely to break as to season and harden.”
His words did not unsettle her. The moment in which she had become intelligible
to herself had passed, leaving her in a strange state of ghostly calm that no
one could revoke.
It did not seem impossible. She had courage. Like a lady in a song, she would
use her wits and her nerve to find the opportunities that would come at the
edge of the moment. Littlefinger had shown her his besetting weakness. It was
herself. She was the sword that he had tempered and the instrument of his
destruction. An inhuman intensity lit her from within. Beyond this place, the
true world was calling her. To answer it would absolve all. Her fingers caught
the neck of her bedgown, pulling until it fell off her shoulders, baring her
breasts.
“Do you know where the heart is?” she whispered as she caressed his sword hand.
He gave a faint sob, almost a laugh, his face twisting into an ugly sneer.
“Bugger that. I hate that fucking stupid story. Azor Ahai should have never
killed Nissa Nissa. Heroes were meant to die for beauty, not the other way
around.”
With the careful slowness of a wounded animal sinking down to rest, he knelt on
the ground. “I'm going to crush the cage, reach across the distance and find
you.”
Sandor’s hands cupped her elbows and he drew her forward with a groan. The
Hound's fingers dug deep into her arms, holding her tight as he breathed
against her ear. “Make you feel my flesh and blood on you. Inside of you.”
His head fell deeply back, baring his throat to her in submission. “My lonely
wolf,” he gulped a sobbing breath.
Sansa leaned towards him, consuming the scent of him, his very essence in a
deep breath. Her teeth gently closed over the curve of his great bull neck.
He made a low growl. He put his right palm at her throat, his thumb pressing
into her vein. The sound of her own pulse throbbed in her ear as she pressed
her sharp kisses to his neck. Her lips were warm, wet, sucking, strong, so
strong that she would leave marks.
“Born to serve,” he laughed. She could feel the tremor inside of him, bone-
deep.
Snowflakes melted on her eyelids, like a curtain descending. A drop of sweat
trailed from behind Sandor’s ear to salt her lips.
She felt a sharp tug on the back of her neck. The blood drained out of her
face. Pearls popping, bouncing on the ground, tap-tap-tap.
Then she was vanishing, a mist that rose to the dark trees, to the dissolving
woods, leaving behind the winged insects that kept on singing each day of the
shortening summer.
 
***** Hour of the Wolf *****
Chapter Notes
     This is an illustrated novella and is meant to be read in the manner
     of a real book with two pages side by side. As such, I've had to
     publish it as an emagazine/pdf flipbook rather than on the AO3
     platform.
     But here's the text only as well for A03
      
     I've provided links below on how to read the illustrated novella so
     that my A03 readership can access this fanwork.
      
     In order to optimize your reading experience, please follow these
     guidelines for your device:
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         * Ipad / Other tablet / Cellphone (orient device to landscape
           view): Click_on_this_emagazine_link
     **PDF files require your system has the free software, Adobe_Reader
      

     If you'd like to leave reviews on A03, I would certainly be
     appreciative.
Moon has set
and Pleiades: middle
night, the hour goes by,
alone I lie.
Sappho, Fragment 168B
 
Alayne opened her eyes to slits. What was the hour? It was still night time by
all appearances, yet she felt bed sore, as if she had slept for a thousand
years.
She pulled at her blankets, her body damp from sweat, her throat tight from a
heavy catch in it. A wet compress fell off her forehead as she sat up abruptly
into the dark. The room smelled of soured milk. She leapt out of bed to open
the curtains.
The light of the full moon threw the disorderliness of her chamber in sharp
relief. An unfamiliar basket of needlework lay beside a chair situated to face
her. A thin broken branch of a weirwood tree stood in a small vase near her
left bedside table, its blood red leaves old and dry.
Her eye sought and found a maester’s trestle table in the far corner, full of
scores of vials and healing books. She walked towards it and picked up the
piece of parchment she found there. In Maester Colemon's jagged script it said:
Alayne continues to worsen each day. Rapid heartbeat, agitation, delirium,
burning fever … I fear death will take her.
Well, death had not taken her but her brush with it had left her not quite
herself, feeling strange and emotionless. She returned to her window, opening
it. The small night wind cooled her fevered brow, played with her disheveled
hair.
“It’s the hour of the wolf,” she said aloud; the full moon hung in the
darkness, halfway between its zenith and the western horizon. Sunrise would
come in a few hours. What had Old Nan told her about this time? The hour of the
wolf was when most old people die and when most infants are born. When ghosts
and small gods were at their strongest.
A strange brutal pull compelled her to look eastwards and there it was, between
two snow-blanketed trees. The Moonmaid. Small and yet oh so very haunting,
raising the hairs on Alayne’s arms. Suddenly, a swoop of sparrows whipped their
wings down the sky, through midair; they came so close that the girl screeched,
covering her face with her palms. But instead of little scratches, she only
felt the flap of their little wings, scooping air, sifting snowflakes that hit
her cheeks as softly as kisses.
She turned away from her window feeling tense and hot and churning over some
forgotten, forgotten—What have I forgotten? Her thoughts flickered through
her—dreams of running, keys to lost names— no more seizable than the smoldering
breath of a blown out candle …
She climbed back into bed. Dawn was approaching and it would bring others with
it. There was nothing to do but wait. Her eyes rested upon that tapestry that
hung in her chamber. Scudding clouds drifted over the moon, staggering its
light. Her vision wobbled and shifted. Either she was growing much smaller or
it was growing much bigger, until she could focus on nothing else save the
weft-faced weaving. In one panel, the white knight fought the dragon. Ser
Serwyn in his Kingsguard armor on his black horse. The evil dragon Urrax, a
nightmare vision with its glittering scales and wings crested with gold, teeth
like black daggers, breath plumes of green fire. In the next panel, the
Princess Daeryssa, bound and in service to cruel giants that lived in the high
mountain that lay at the heart of the forest. Oh, thatface. Full of ferocious
yearning to reach through the dark and eternal forest boughs, through time and
space, to pull the white knight to her. The emotion sighed through Alayne with
surprising intensity and she felt the beginnings of a quiver in her breastbone.
Lovers fixed in time in a work of art. Their ardor would be forever green and
forever unfulfilled. They lived right next to each other, loving everlastingly
and yet never kissing. Her hand went to her mouth, covering her lips, her eyes
wide and watery. That the old stories could play in her head and continue to
move her in spite of her learning.
She rolled over, face down, into her pillow. Her nose against the linen, moving
it all over, searching for some mysterious scent like a hound. There was
nothing. She bolted up, every nerve atingle. She strained for control but the
trembling intensified.
A few moments later, for no reason she understood and despite every effort to
prevent it, she burst into tears. They spilled down her cheeks, filling her
mouth. Their taste not merely salty but bitter: the tears of bereavement.
Her whole body shook. Her nose ran with snot. She sobbed for an hour at least,
maybe more. Such sorrow unleashed. Taut with heartbreak, with the unspeakable
desolation over something not just lost but simply forgotten.
“Gods be good, Gods be good…”
Still hiccupping sobs, she picked up the leaf from the weirwood branch and ate
it. She didn't understand what she was doing, only understanding that the
weirwood leaf had the strong scent of things that were, and that taking this
into her body was better than crying and moaning for all eternity.
Where the danger is, deliverance also grows. 
Who had told her that? Septon Chayle? Yet her mind conjured up a face, the face
of her brother Bran, but old, older than any human had a right to be. So old he
looked as if he had walked a thousand years upon the earth.
The Old One spoke to her, if only in whispers, of something inside of her that
longed to be named.
It seemed forever before Sansa lifted her head. Footsteps. The warble and whine
of mockingbirds announcing the dawn. Be she alive or be she dead, I'll grind
her bones to make my bread.
Sansa let out a ragged breath but did not shiver. There was a feeling in her
blood, something marching through her, someone new and courageous and wonderful
waiting to be born.
“Now is when the point of the story changes,” she said, her voice a hush.
Inside her brain, a sleeping wolf sprang awake, its yellow eyes opening in the
dark.
 
 
THE END
 
 
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